[1] Chambre Ardente,—under the ancien régime, a tribunal charged with the investigation of heinous crimes and having power to burn those found guilty.
VII
mploying a very old-fashioned locution, the citoyenne Gamelin had declared: "that by dint of eating chestnuts they would be turning into chestnuts." As a matter of fact, on that day, the 13th July, she and her son had made their midday dinner on a basin of chestnut porridge. As they were finishing this austere repast, a lady pushed open the door and the room was flooded in an instant with the splendour of her presence and the fragrance of her perfumes. Évariste recognised the citoyenne Rochemaure. Thinking she had mistaken the door and meant her visit for the citoyen Brotteaux, her friend of other days, he was already preparing to point her out the ci-devant aristocrat's garret or perhaps summon Brotteaux and so spare an elegant woman the task of scrambling up a mill-ladder; but she made it clear at once that the citoyen Évariste Gamelin and no other was the person she had come to see by announcing that she was happy to find him at home and was his servant to command.
They were not entirely strangers to each other, having met more than once in David's studio, in a box at the Assembly Hall, at the Jacobins, at Venua's restaurant. On these occasions she had been struck by his good looks and youth and interesting air.
Wearing a hat beribboned like a fairing and plumed like the head-piece of a Representative on mission, the citoyenne Rochemaure was wigged, painted, patched and scented. But her complexion was young and fresh behind all these disguises; these extravagant artificialities of fashion only betokened a frantic haste to enjoy life and the feverishness of these dreadful days when the morrow was so uncertain. Her corsage, with wide facings and enormous basques and all ablaze with huge steel buttons, was blood-red, and it was hard to tell, so aristocratic and so revolutionary at one and the same time was her array, whether it was the colours of the victims or of the headsman that she sported. A young officer, a dragoon, accompanied her.
Dandling her long cane by its handle of mother-o'-pearl, a tall, fine woman, of generous proportions and ample bosom, she made the circuit of the studio, and putting up to her grey eyes her double quizzing-glasses of gold, examined the painter's canvases with many smiles and exclamations of delight, admiring the handsome artist and flattering him in hopes of a return in kind.
"What," asked the citoyenne, "is that picture—it is so nobly conceived, so touching—of a gentle, beautiful woman standing by a young man lying sick?"
Gamelin told her it was meant to represent Orestes tended by his sister Electra, and that, had he been able to finish it, it might perhaps have been the least unsatisfactory of his works.