play; the evenings
were sacred to music, reading and conversation.
Horace Greeley was once a prisoner in Paris. From his cell he wrote, "The
Saint Peter who holds the keys of this place has kindly locked the world
out; and for once, thank Heaven, I am free from intrusion."
Lovers of truth must thank exile for some of our richest and ripest
literature. Exile is not all exile. Imagination can not be imprisoned.
Amid the winding bastions of the brain, thought roams free and
untrammeled.
Liberty is only a comparative term, and Victor Hugo at Guernsey enjoyed a
thousand times more freedom than ever ruling monarch knew.
Standing at the shelf-desk where this "Gentleman of France" stood for so
many happy hours, I inscribed my name in the "visitors' book."
I thanked the good woman who had shown me the place, and told me so much
of interest--thanked her in words that seemed but a feeble echo of all
that my heart would say.
I went down the stairs--out at the great carved doorway--and descended
the well-worn steps.
Perched on a crag waiting for me was little Gavroche, his rags fluttering
in the breeze. He offered to show me the great stone chair where Gilliatt
sat when the tide came up and carried him away. And did I want to buy a
bull calf? Gavroche knew where there was a fine one that could be bought
cheap. Gavroche would show me both the calf and the stone chair for
threepence.
I accepted the offer, and we went down the stony street toward the sea,
hand in hand.
* * * * *
On the Twenty-eighth day of June, Eighteen Hundred
Ninety-four, I took my place in the long line and passed slowly through
the Pantheon at Paris and viewed the body of President Carnot.
The same look of proud dignity that I had seen in life was there--calm,
composed, serene. The inanimate clay was clothed in the simple black of a
citizen of the Republic; the only mark of office being the red silken
sash that covered the spot in the breast where the stiletto-stroke of
hate had gone home.
Amid bursts of applause, surrounded by loving friends and loyal
adherents, he was stricken down and passed out into the Unknown. Happy
fate! to die before the fickle populace had taken up a new idol; to step
in an instant beyond the reach of malice--to leave behind the
self-seekers that pursue, the hungry horde that follows, the zealots who
defame; to escape the dagger-thrust of calumny and receive only the
glittering st
|