"Nothing but the same string of horrors at Paris, and it was even said that the number of victims had sensibly increased."
Carried away by his subject, he detailed to the two women scraps of conversation overheard that night at the village of Saint-Prix. As he spoke, Marie Thérèse, now seated near him on the grass, with his coat spread before her, silently smoothed out the creases, and his mother drank in every word with breathless attention.
Nothing was left of the Clarisse of sixteen but the velvet softness of the blue eyes, and the sweet charm of their expression, with all the pristine freshness of a pure soul still mirrored in their depth. The thin, colourless face seemed modelled in deep furrows, and the fair hair was already shot with silver. Though poorly clad in the dress of a peasant, she also might have betrayed her better birth to a practised observer by her white hands, with tapered fingers and delicate wrists, and by the supple grace of her bearing. But who could regard as an aristocrat this poor woman, almost old, sheltering under her maternal wing the stout young workman, with his resolute air and hands blackened at the forge?
She now went under the name of Durand, as did her son and her niece, Marie Thérèse, who passed as the child of her brother-in-law. The young girl was, in reality, the daughter of her own brother, the young student of the College of Navarre, who had been killed the preceding year in Vendée, fighting in the ranks of the Chouans, in the Royalist cause. Clarisse's husband also met his fate at one of these sanguinary combats, for he was so dangerously wounded that a few days after he had been secretly conveyed to London he died in great agony.
For Clarisse had been married, and was now a widow.
And her past: it could be written in a page—a little page; yet in writing it her hand would have trembled at every line. Deserted by her betrayer, receiving no reply to her letters, she realised, when too late, his cold egoism and ambition. She had been separated from her child, who was born in the retirement of a little village of Dauphiné, whither her father had taken her, and had been immediately confided to the care of peasants, where she was allowed to visit him once a fortnight, subject to a thousand precautions imposed by Monsieur de Pontivy.
And yet, with all this weight of sadness, Clarisse retained her native grace. Misfortune had but added charm to her delicate and melancholy beauty.
It sometimes happened, though very seldom, that she was obliged to accompany her father into society. On one of these rare occasions she attracted the notice of a young captain of the Queen's Guards, Monsieur de Mauluçon, who sought her society assiduously, fell in love with her, and asked Monsieur de Pontivy for her hand.
"Your offer does us much honour," the Councillor had replied, "but I should wish you to see Mademoiselle de Pontivy herself, before renewing your request to me."
And Monsieur de Pontivy notified the fact to Clarisse the same evening with characteristic formality: