Estelle dropped her eyes, as she curtseyed.
Cornelie smiled, and looked me full in the face.
Neither, however, paid much attention to me after the first salutation. I was younger than the youngest of them—that is to say, in their eyes, almost a child.
As to the apprentices, one appeared to be about eighteen, and the other a month or two older than I.
The elder was called Jacques Dinant. I don’t know what has since become of him. The other was Félicién Herda, afterwards a celebrity in the Revolution.
This latter was a young man—fair, of a light complexion—a regular child of Paris—irritable, and as nervous as a woman. The nickname which his comrades gave him, as his irritability was always dragging him into controversy, and as he used always to say “No” to every theory, was “Citizen Veto.”
Need I say that the veto was the prerogative of the King, and that it was through his wrong use of this privilege on two occasions that he alienated his people.
Madame Duplay appeared from the kitchen, with the first course. I was presented to her; but she paid even less attention to me than her two daughters had done.
She was about thirty-eight or forty years of age, and must, at one time, have been beautiful, but with those coarse and too matured charms common to the lower orders of the people.
She shared all the patriotic opinions of her husband, and was, like him, an ardent admirer of Robespierre.