“Name of a pipe!” exclaimed he, slapping his musket. “Is it possible, citoyenne, that you are the new concierge?”
The woman nodded. “Yes, citizen sentry. I was instructed to come this afternoon. My baggage, a small trunk, should have arrived already.”
“I don’t believe it has,” said M. Grégoire Thibault musingly, and he rubbed a rather bristly chin. “If I had seen anything of it, I shouldn’t have forgotten that you were coming. But perhaps it arrived this morning before I was on duty.” He appeared to be ruminating on this possibility, but in reality he was thinking to himself, “She has been a fine woman, that, once!” Aloud, he said, “I knew, of course, that Mère Prévost was giving up her job, but I had forgotten that she was to leave to-day. Her man has come back from the wars, I believe, short of an arm. And so you are the new caretaker, citoyenne?”
He took another look at her. “Le diable m’emporte,” he thought this time, “if she is not a fine woman still!”
Resting his musket against the sentry-box he went slowly, fishing out a key, to the movable portion of the barrier. But having got there, instead of unfastening the padlock he turned round again, leaning against the bar.
“I’m sure I hope you’ll like this business, citoyenne,” he began conversationally. “Pretty dreary, I take it, living alone in that great house there, full of nothing but memories of the time of the Tyrant, and of the bloodshed the day the people took it. If one believed in ghosts, now——”
“You don’t believe in them, evidently, Citizen?”
“I hope I am a better patriot,” responded the National Guard with dignity. “Ghosts, the so-called saints, prayers for the dead, the Republic has done away with all that nonsense.”
“Yes, there has been a good deal done away with these last ten years.” The tone of this remark a little puzzled Grégoire, but he continued nevertheless, “Still, I must confess that Décadi doesn’t often see me at the Temple, unless there’s a wedding. It’s just a little wearisome. . . . But my wife in Paris goes to the Temple of Genius regularly—the late edifice Roch, as you know—and says she likes it, especially since they have instituted recitations by the children, and our youngest took a prize. But what were we speaking of?—ah, the château. Well, if I were not a good patriot, and disbelieved in saints and angels and all that rubbish, I might be tempted to think that the ci-devant Duchesse walked there o’ nights without her head, or maybe with it, looking in her silks and satins as she did before they stuck it on a pike, for I have heard that she was a famous beauty.”
“Yes, I have heard that,” said the newcomer with a shade of impatience. “But I have also heard that it is incorrect,” she added.