Edmond Cléry looked agitated.
"It is only the beginning," he whispered, as he passed his friend. He was on duty with the prisoners, so further conversation was impossible; but Dangeau's sleep in the Council-room was not much sounder than that of the night before in the Queen's ante-chamber.
CHAPTER V
A CARNIVAL OF BLOOD
September the third dawned heavy with murky clouds, out of which climbed a sun all red, like a ball of fire. The mists of the autumn morning caught the tinge, but no omens could add to the tense foreboding which wrapt the city. It needed no signs in the sky to prophesy a day of terror.
At La Force a crowded court-yard held those of the prisoners who had escaped the previous day's massacre. They had been driven from their cells at dawn, and, after an hour or two of strained anticipation, had gathered into their accustomed coteries. Mme de Lamballe, who had heard the mob howling for her blood, sat placidly beautiful. Now and then she spoke to a friend, but for the most part she kept her eyes on the tiny copy of The Imitation of Christ which was found in her blood-stained clothes later on in that frightful day. Others, less devout, or less alarmed, were gossipping, chattering, even laughing, or playing cards, as if La Force were Versailles, and the hands on the clock of Time had never moved for the last four years.
Mme de Maillé was gone. Her hacked corpse still lay in its pool of blood, her dead eyes stared unburied at the lowering sky; but Mme de Montargis sat in her old place, her attendant Vicomte at her side. If her face was pale the rouge hid it, and at least her smile was as ready, her voice as careless, as ever. Bault, the gaoler, stared as he passed her.
"These aristocrats!" he muttered; "any honest woman would be half-dead of fright after yesterday, and what to-day will bring, Heaven knows! I myself, mille diables! I myself, I shake, my hand trembles, I am in the devil's own sweat,—and there she sits, that light woman, and laughs!"
As he passed into his own room, his wife caught him by the arm——
"Jean, Jean, mon Dieu, Jean! They are coming back!" He strained his ears, listening, gripping his wife, as she gripped him.