“Good heavens! Do you mean that——?”
“Did you ever see her at the Tuileries in the days of the old régime?”
“No, but——”
“Well, from to-day you can say that you have had the honour of touching her skin!”
Knowing that among the eccentricities of horror produced by the French Revolution human tanneries had a place, Wilfrid had no need to ask more with that binding, white and lustrous, staring him in the face.
“There is all that is left of the Princess Lamballe,” said Pauline, her eyes set with a stony grief, a grief too deep for tears. “We were brought up from girlhood together. She was my dearest friend. She was young; she was beautiful; she was good. And you know her end? Taken to the prison of La Force, her only crime being that she was a friend of the Queen’s, she was flung forth from the prison-gate into the hands of a howling mob. And then.... My God! it will not bear thinking of.... Pieces of the body put on the end of pikes were paraded through the streets.... Some found their way to the tanyard....”
Overcome by the recollection, she was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again it was in a mood fierce and dark.
“Do you wonder now why I hate the Republic? Let my father serve it, if he will. For my part, I work for its downfall.”
It was clear to Wilfrid from this, as well as from previous remarks made by her, that the one passionate aim of Pauline’s life was the subversion of the Republic and the restoration of the Bourbons, an aim laudable enough in itself, were she any other than she was, but scarcely compatible with her position as the daughter of the Ambassador of the French Republic.