I recall her the first evening of my incarceration, when I was permitted to descend, rather late, to the salle de récréation of the proscribed. She was seated, with other ladies, at the long table. The music of their voices rippled under the vaulted ceiling. They worked, these dear creatures—the decree depriving prisoners of all implements and equipments not yet being formulated. Madame la Marquise stitched proverbs into a sampler in red silk. She looked, perhaps, a morsel slatternly for a grande dame, and her fine lace was torn. But the sampler must not be neglected, for all that. Since the days she had played at “Proverbs” (how often?) in the old paternal château, her little philosophy of life had been all maxims misapplied. Her sampler was as eloquent to her as was their knitting to the ladies in the Place du Trône. Endowed with so noble a fund of sentiments, how could they accuse her of inhumanity? I think she had a design to plead “sampler” before Fouquier Tinville by-and-by.
I had an opportunity presently to examine her work. “A laver la tête d’un Maure on perd sa lessive.” She had just finished it—in Roman characters, too, as a concession to the Directory. It was a problem-axiom the Executive had resolved unanswerably—as I was bound to tell her.
“Comment?” she asked, with a little sideling perk of her head, like a robin.
“Can madame doubt? It requests the black thing to sneeze once into the basket; and, behold! the difficulty is surmounted.”
“Fi donc!” she cried, and stole me a curious glance. Was I delirious with the Revolution fever?
“Of what do they accuse you, my friend?” she said kindly, by-and-by.
“A grave offence, surely. There is little hope for me. I gave a citizen ‘you’ instead of ‘thou.’”
“So? But how men are thoughtless! Alas!” (She treated me to a little proverb again.) “‘The sleeping cat needs not to be aroused.’”
This was late in the evening, a little before the “lock up” hour was arrived.
Earlier, as I had entered, she lifted her eyebrows to Gardel, who stood, her chevalier d’honneur, behind her chair. The man advanced at once, with infinite courtesy, and bade me welcome, entirely in the grand manner, to the society of La Force.