“It shall be excused, or blamed, for its wit,” said Vergniaud, and as he spoke there came uproar from a distance, where some victim to mob-resentment was being trailed through a horsepond. A cloud shut out the sun. The two men, fallen suddenly moody, made their way to a gate that led from the gardens into the Rue du Dauphin, that was a tributary of the Rue St Honoré. Vergniaud glanced up at the name of the former. “Tient à un fil,” he murmured, and shook his head, with a sigh.
On the moment of their emerging into the greater thoroughfare, a discordant rabble came upon them—a mouthing, sweltering throng of patriots, with a woman at their head banging a drum.
“Voilà la prêtresse habituée, Théroigne de Méricourt!” said Vergniaud, with a soft chuckle.
Ned gasped and stared. He had not alighted on this woman—had recalled her only fitfully—since the night when she fled from his uncle’s house. Even Madame de Lawoestine’s reference to her had affected him but indifferently. If, during his present sojourn in Paris, he, absorbed in more introspective searchings, had heard casual mention of the “Liége courtesan,” the “coryphée of the Orleanists,” the beloved (according to the wits of Les Actes des Apôtres) of the Deputy Populus (who did not so much as know her), a least desire to identify this reputation with the one of his experience had not overtaken him. Théroigne—were it, indeed, the Théroigne of his knowledge—had only followed the course he might have predicted for her. To drain the rich for the benefit of the needy—that were a noble form of solicitation. To feed starving patriots and their cause with the fruits of her dishonour was a rendering of the theme that scarcely commended itself to other than Parisian morals. Yet he had lost sight, no doubt, of the motive that induced her to wage war, by whatever means, upon the order patrician. It was to be recalled to his memory.
For now, suddenly, he was face to face with the embodiment of a passion to whose early processes he had unwittingly contributed. The girl saw, halted her vociferous troupe, and the next instant came towards him. A fantastic figure, a thing of shreds and gaudy tatters, detached itself from the throng and followed at her heels.
“Corne de Dieu!” muttered Vergniaud, “the dog too?”
Théroigne stopped in front of the Englishman—a presentment, in flesh and clothing, of vivid, barbaric licence. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed. For four years the “Defier of God,” she had walked with her face to the sun. She was, and was to be, “Mater Tenebrarum—the mother of lunacies, the suggestress of suicides”—a flaming evolution from the scorned and abandoned village beauty.
She had on a little military jacket of dark-blue, over a white chemisette cut low to her swelling figure; a tricolour sash, in which was stuck a pistol, went round her waist, and from this fell to her ankles a short skirt of scarlet. Cocked daintily on her head was an elfin hat with feathers à la Henri IV., and suspended from her shoulder by a red ribbon a little smart drum bobbed and tinkled at her side as she walked.
She clinched a hand upon her bosom, scorning and daring, in the fierce exultation of her beauty, this possible critic of it.
“We are well met,” she said. “Dost thou know me, citizen Englishman?”