"What is that?" he asked, with a nervous laugh of joy. "Do you by chance carry your compositions in your breast-pocket?"
"There, I had forgotten," said the youth, taking a parchment from his pocket. "The countess gave it me, and says it is to be deposited in the proper registry."
The doctor examined the paper. It was a document which empowered, in default of heirs male, to the titles of Philip de Taverney, Knight of Redcastle, Sebastian Emile Gilbert, son of Andrea Taverney, Countess of Charny, to wear that title honorarily until the king should make it good to him by favor of his mother's service to the Crown, and perhaps award him the estates to maintain the dignity.
"Keep it," said Gilbert, with a melancholy smile; "as well date it from the Greek kalends! The king, I fear, will nevermore dispose of more than six-feet-by-three of landed property in his once kingdom of France."
Gilbert could jest, for he believed Andrea saved.
He had reckoned without Marat. A week after, he learned that the scoundrel had denounced the favorite of the queen, and that the widowed Countess of Charny had been arrested and lodged in the old Abbey Prison.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
THE ASSEMBLY AND THE COMMUNE.
It was the Commune which had caused the attack on the palace, which the king must have seen, for he took refuge in the House, and not in the City Hall. The Commune wanted to smother the wolf—the she-wolf and the whelps—between two blankets in their den.
This shelter to the royals converted the Assembly into Royalists. It was asserted that the Luxembourg Palace, assigned to the king as a residence, had a secret communication with those catacombs which burrow under Paris, so that he might get away at any hour.