Page:Peterson Magazine 1869B.pdf/496

MARIE ANTOINETTE'S TALISMAN. 453 pale, worn, and so weak from protracted excitement that he fell upon a chair, and wiped the heavy drops from his forehead before speaking a word. Madame Gosner looked at him earnestly. He understood the question in her eyes, and answered as if she had spoken.

"Yes, my friend, I have been to the Bastile. I have wandered through those infernal vaults, and seen such sights."

"Have you been in that cell?"

Madame Gosner's voice was sharp as the cry of an eagle. She had lost all control of herself.

"Yes, I have been there, and I have seen him-your husband

"Alive?"

"Alive! I held his hand-I spoke with him. He told me his name. It was he who cried out when your voice penetrated his dungeon . They have practiced a foul fraud on us- one that shall be answered by the thunders of those stones as we hurl down that accursed building. Madame Gosner stood up, and lifted her clasped hands on high.

"So help me God, I will never rest till this thing is done!"

She spoke like a woman inspired ; her very statue seemed to rise higher ; her chest expanded itself.

"Be it so. I have already sworn," said Monsieur Jaque; and the two went out together, leaving Marguerite alone upon her knees, where she had fallen.

All was changed now in the humble dwelling of Madame Gosner. No more work was done; scarcely was there food enough prepared to sus- tain the strength of that excited woman. Solemn duties lay before her—a gigantic task, which she would perform, or die. The people of France were to be aroused into keener vindictiveness—the women organized—the clubs spurred to swifter action. Stern and terrible had been the effect of Monsieur Jaque’s intelligence on the woman who had refused to consider herself a widow. Her whole being rose up in bitter wrath against what she deemed a horrible fraud. So fixed and deep were her prejudices against the royal family, that she never, for a moment, doubted that the king himself, if not the queen, had sanctioned the wrong that had been done, rather than cast a new witness of royal cruelty among the people to bear testimony against them.

With these feelings, it is not strange that all the sweet sentiments of undisturbed womanhood was, for a time, swept out of her nature. No amazon born to war ever suffered or felt a deeper thirst for vengeance than possessed her. From that day her very face changed ; all its fine features were set, and locked with the iron resolution that possessed her. In some way her busband should be set free, or fearfully avenged. Many a woman beside herself had equal wrongs and equal suffering to redress or avenge ; but, lacking a leader and organization, this great force, this underlying principle, which was enough to stir the already excited passions of the lower order into anarchy at any moment, had as yet been allowed to exhaust itself in complaint and denunciation. Now it should be centralized and spread forth from an organized source.

Madame Gosner knew that she was eloquent, and felt within herself all the force of great individual strength; that which had been an idea before was a fixed resolve now. In order to liberate her husband, freedom must first be given to the French people. She could only reach his dungeon through the ruins of the Bastile.

That day a strange sight was witnessed in the market-places of Paris. A woman, clad like the commonest working-woman, but of commanding presence, was seen moving from stall to stall with the firm, energetic tread of an officer mustering recruits. At each stall she uttered words that burned and thrilled through the heart of the occupant like the blast of a where trumpet, yet they were spoken in a low voice, and circulated through the market from lip to lip, drawing the women together in clusters, who told each other the story of this woman, and swore to avenge her.

Her low, stern utterance of wrongs that seemed without a parallel, was like a spark of living fire flung into their own smouldering passions.

That night a Jacobin club-house was crowded with eager women. From the market, the garrets, and the cellars of Paris, they gathered, crowding their husbands and sons aside that they might hear something of their own wrongs from the tongue of a terribly persecuted woman.

Gosner's wife stood among them like a prestess. Unlike the women around her, she was edu cated, eloquent, powerfully impassioned, but capable of deep reasoning. She had dwelt so long on the wrongs of France that her acute mind searched down to the very roots of all the grievances that disturbed her people, and laid them bare before the rude women, who seized upon them as hounds fasten upon game, routed from bush and covert by the huntsman.

For two hours she filled that Jacobin stronghold with such burning eloquence as never