The position was changed indeed since their first meeting, when, unknown and unconsidered, he was invited, in a manner that could scarcely be called complimentary, to criticise the portrait of the beautiful, fashionable woman who now stood before him as lovely as ever, her face pale, and her soft dark eyes raised anxiously to his, but without any symptom of terror.
From the first moment of this interview Tallien was seized with an overpowering passion for her, which he was compelled to conceal by the presence of the gaoler, who waited to re-conduct the prisoner to her cell, and before whom if he showed either pity or sympathy, in spite of all his power as a leader of the Revolution, he would endanger his own safety and increase her danger. Therefore he only bowed, signed to her to sit down, and took a chair opposite her.
“You recognised me?” she asked.
“Yes, citoyenne; why are you at Bordeaux?”
“Because every one is in prison at Paris; even the revolutionists. And I am a revolutionist.”
“We are not blind,” said Tallien. “We only strike the enemies of the Republic.”
“The prisons are blind, then,” retorted Térèzia; “for both at Paris and here true republicans are groaning in fetters.”
She spoke in the inflated style of the time, which belonged especially to the ranting, extravagant, theatrical phraseology of that strange collection of individuals who now held supreme power in the country so recently the most civilised and polished in the world.
“If the prison is blind, the tribunal is not. Of what are you accused, citoyenne?”