Sir Percy Leads the Band

22 AT THE CHÂTEAU

It did not take Conty long after that to persuade a couple of hundred people who were down in the dumps and saw no prospect of getting out of them that it was their duty to go at once to the Château de la Rodière and show these arrogant ci-devants that when the sovereignty of the people was questioned, it would know how to turn the tables on those who dared to flout it. The fact that he quite omitted to explain how the sovereignty of the people had in this particular instance been assailed did not weigh with his unsophisticated audience in the least. They had nothing on earth to do this afternoon, and they were told that it was their patriotic duty to march to La Rodière and there to make themselves as unpleasant as possible, so why in the world should they hesitate?

Headed at first by Citizen Conty himself they all trooped out of the Restaurant Tison, after the manner of those determined Amazons who had marched from Paris to Versailles and there insisted on seeing the ci- devant royal family-Louis Capet, his wife and his two children-and on making their presence felt there, in spite of Bodyguards. So most of what was left of the population of Choisy assembled on the Grand' Place, there formed itself into a compact body and started to march through the town, and thence up the hill, headed by a band of musicians who had sprung up from nowhere a few days ago and had since then greatly contributed to the gaiety inside the cafés and restaurants by their spirited performance of popular airs. On this great occasion they headed the march with their fiddles and trumpets and drum. There were five of them altogether and their leader, a great hulking fellow who should have been fighting for his country instead of scraping the catgut, was soon very popular with the crowd. His rendering of the "Marseillaise" might be somewhat faulty, but he was such a lively kind of vagabond that he put every one into good humour long before they reached the château.

And they remained in rare good humour. For them this march, this proposed baiting of the aristos was just an afternoon's holiday, something to take them out of themselves, to help them to forget their misery, their squalor, the ever-present fear that conditions of life would get worse rather than better. Above all, it lured them into the belief that this glorious revolution had done something stupendous for them-they didn't quite know what, poor things, but there it was: the millennium, so the men from Paris kept on assuring them. Admittedly, this stupendous thing, this millennium, was already overdue, but these exciting expeditions and telling those arrogant ci-devants a few home truths, made it easier to wait for the really happy days to come, and so the insurrectionary march on La Rodière progressed merrily. It is a fact that insurrection, as an art, carried on by an unruly mob, was the direct product of the Revolution in France. It was revolutionary France that first invented and then perfected the art of insurrection. There was no such thing before 1789, when the crowd stormed the Bastille and reduced it, as a besieging army would reduce an enemy fort. And the movement has to a great extent retained its perfection only in France, probably because it suits the impulsive French temperament better than the temperament of other nations.

Actually a mob-an angry mob-say in England, in Russia or Germany, is usually just a mass of dull, tenacious and probably vindictive humanity; but in France, even during the fiercest days of revolution, there was always an element of inventiveness, almost of genius, in the crowd of men and women that went hammering at the gates of châteaux, insisted on seeing its owners, even when, as in Versailles, these were still their King and Queen, and devised a score of ways of humiliating and baiting them without necessarily resorting to violence. Thus, a French mob is unlike any other in the world.

And so it was in this instance with the hundred or two of women and derelicts who marched up the hill to La Rodière. In the wake of an unwashed, out-at-elbows, raffish troupe of musicians. They stumped along, those, at any rate, who were able-bodied, shouting and singing snatches of the "Marseillaise," not feeling the cold, which was bitter, nor the fatigue of breasting the incline up to the château, on a road slippery with ice and snow. They were as lively as they could be, not knowing exactly what they were going to do once they got up there and came face to face with the ci-devant Marquis and Marquise, for whom they had worked in the past and from whom they had received alternately many kindnesses and many blows. Those who were lame or otherwise feeble, such as Hector the cobbler or Jean the epileptic, stumped along, too, but more slowly, and soon there was a straggling group that fell away from the main body, a group made up of all the derelicts in Choisy who had lost a limb or an eye, were half-witted, or otherwise incapable, but nevertheless were as lively, as expectant of fun, as were their more favoured fellow-citizens.