Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it, no

functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate

successfully.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

Chapter XXX

DRAWN TO THE LOADSTONE ROCK

n such risings of fire and risings of seathe firm earth shaken

by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but

was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and

wonder of the beholders on the shorethree years of tempest

were consumed. Three more birthdays of little Lucie had been

woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of

her home.

Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the

echoes in the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard

the thronging feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds as

the footsteps of a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with

their country declared in danger, changed into wild beasts, by

terrible enchantment long persisted in.

Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the

phenomenon of his not being appreciated: of his being so little

wanted in France, as to incur considerable danger of receiving his

dismissal from it, and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who

raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the

sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but

immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s

Prayer backwards for a great number of years, and performing

many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner

beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.

The shining Bull’s Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

been the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never

been a good eye to see withhad long had the mote in it of

Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury, and a mole’s blindness

but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court, from that

exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue,

corruption, and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was

gone; had been besieged in its Palace and ‘suspended,’ when the

last tidings came over.

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and

ninety-two was come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered

far and wide.

As was natural, the headquarters and great gathering-place of

Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson’s Bank. Spirits are

supposed to haunt the places where their bodies most resorted,

and Monseigneur without a guinea haunted the spot where his

guineas used to be. Moreover, it was the spot to which such

French intelligence as was most to be relied upon, came quickest.

Again: Tellson’s was a munificent house, and extended great