‘You told me she squeezed it into a shoe always too small when we saw her at Versailles,’ replied the other. ‘O the jealousy of women!’
‘You have smarted yourself, monsieur, when she has refused you for a dance,’ returned the Countess; ‘she did not think you equal to the gay Sainte-Croix.’
‘And yet he dazzled and went out like a firework,’ said Roquelaure; ‘I hope such will not be my fate.’
He smiled affectedly as he spoke. Marie heard the import of their heartless conversation, and gazed at them with an expression of withering contempt. They fell back abashed, and retreated amidst the crowd.
‘In God’s name, monsieur,’ she said, ‘offer me some consolation. Is there not something terrible and unnatural in such barbarous curiosity on the part of these people?’
‘Madame,’ replied Pirot, in whose eyes the tears were standing, from pity for the ordeal she was then undergoing, and that which he knew was to come, ‘regard this curiosity rather as an additional misery imposed upon you as a further expiation than as a wish on the part of these ill-judging people to cause you further pain. Lean on me if you need support. I will aid you as far as is in my power, and the law permits.’
As he spoke the executioner approached, carrying a heavy lighted torch, which he placed in her hands, according to the sentence of the arrest; but her strained and swollen wrists refused to sustain it, and it would have fallen to the ground had not Pirot held it up with his hand, as Marie was leaning heavily upon his arm. The greffier then read the paper a second time, and the dreary procession moved on to the point that required all the nerve of Pirot, no less than of the Marchioness, to encounter—the gate of the lodge that opened into the thoroughfare before the Palais de Justice, which was now nearly blocked up, as far as the eye could reach, in every direction, by a vast and expectant crowd.
As the officers of the prison, with their wands, came forth on the top of the flight of steps, the mass of people became suddenly agitated, and their noise increased; but the moment Marie appeared, prominent amidst them all by reason of her white dress and the torch which she was carrying, a loud and savage roar—a wild continuous cry of ferocious triumph and execration—burst as by one impulse from the entire crowd, and this was caught up by those who were not even visible from the Palais, and echoed along the quays and places adjoining, until the whole of Paris appeared to be speaking with one voice, and rejoicing at the ghastly ceremony about to take place. Marie fell back, as though the uproar had been endowed with material power to strike her; but the expression of her features was not that which Pirot had expected. She was not terrified; on the contrary, the demon appeared to be again reigning in her soul; every line in her face gave indication of the most intense rage; her forehead contracted; her eyes appeared actually scintillating with passion; her under lip was compressed until her teeth almost bit through it, and she clenched Pirot’s arm with a grasp of iron.
‘Speak not to me at present, my friend,’ she said to him, as noticing her emotion, he addressed to her a few words of intended consolation. ‘This is terrible!’
She remained for some minutes as if fixed to the ground gazing at the sea of heads before her, and apparently without the power of moving. Every eye was fixed upon her, for her now fiendish beauty fascinated all who were near her, and no one more than the great painter Lebrun, who was on the steps of the Palais. To the impression made upon him at this fearful moment, and which haunted him long afterwards, we owe the fine painting in the Louvre.