"Take my vinaigrette, child," said the Duchesse, fumbling among her blackness and beads.
"My sister was not frightened," observed the Marquis quietly. It was true; but Armand continued to breathe out slaughter all the way home.
"Well, it is over now," said the Dowager as they turned into the courtyard, "and you need not work yourself into a fever, mon petit."
But it was not over, it was only beginning. Late that afternoon came the news that the mob was breaking into St. Germain l'Auxerrois and pillaging it, smashing the glass, the statues, the pictures, the confessionals, all to the accompaniment of parodies of the services, in the vestments of the church. The great iron cross with the three fleurs-de-lis, which surmounted the building, was pulled down by order of the mayor of the district, destroying the organ in its fall, and by night one of the chef d'oeuvres of the Renaissance was merely bare walls and a heap of debris. Thus did the people of Paris testify their objection to the Legitimists.
On the Legitimists fell also the displeasure of the government, who, instead of proceeding against the rioters, arrested a prominent Royalist or two and issued warrants against the Archbishop of Paris (who was in hiding) and the curé of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. The Duchesse, not from nervousness, but rather from the joy of battle, ordered the great gates of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon to be closed and barricaded. But the Faubourg was quite quiet, though hundreds were howling outside the minister Dupin's house in the Rue Coq-Héron. And there were rumours that the mob had publicly given itself rendez-vous for the next day outside the Archbishop's palace.
On the morrow, therefore, Armand, unmoved by his wife's entreaties, sallied forth to see what was afoot. He was away about an hour and a half, a time that seemed to Horatia as long as the whole day of the wolf-hunt in Brittany. When, to her inexpressible relief, he returned, he announced that there was not a stone left of the Archevêché, that even the iron railings were gone, all the books and furniture in the river, and that the rioters were threatening Notre-Dame itself.
But it passed, that brief sirocco of popular fury, and Paris was gay again—had in fact been gay all the time, after the manner of Paris (seeing it was carnival-tide), though, or perhaps because, the richest ecclesiastical library in France was voyaging down the Seine, and the maskers on the quays were amusing themselves by trying to fish out the Archbishop's furniture from the stream.
CHAPTER IV
(1)
"Then, if you please, Sir, will you have dinner at a quarter after six?" suggested Mrs. Thwaites. "Mr. Dormer can hardly get here before six o'clock."