“Do you know the fortress of Ham?”
She continued before he could answer:
“Picture it as a hollow square of granite, set in the middle of a vast, treeless, marshy plain. It has a huge round tower at two of its angles, a powder-magazine at each of the others. A sluggish canal crawls beneath the south and east ramparts, a river winds across the marshy plain, passing beneath the walls of the town. There is only one gateway, guarded by a square tower,—you enter, and are in a great courtyard surrounded by lofty walls, commanded by heavy masses of masonry, with water oozing from the blocks of stone that sparkle with crystals of salt-peter.... One building has grated windows—by that you know it is a prison. Another is the Barracks—a third is the dwelling of the Commandant.”
She said, with a strange wild laugh, and a look of darkling remembrance:
“I spent my honeymoon there, as a bride of seventeen, eight years ago. You have noticed that I am very pale, have you not? It is because all my roses faded and died in that chill cavern of dripping stone. My schoolfellows at the Convent, who used to joke about ‘Henriette’s red cheeks,’ would not have known me. Indeed, I seemed a stranger to myself.... The Tragedy of Existence had been revealed to me. I found it overwhelming.... Perhaps I find it so still, but I have mastered the art of hiding what I feel.”
She was playing a scene as the Henriettes alone know how to play it. This atmosphere, vibrating with allusions, hints, references to hidden griefs, quenched hopes and inward anguish, was the natural element in which she breathed. From the quiver of her lips to the heave of her beautiful bosom, every effect was thought out and calculated; no inflection of her voice but was intended to make its effect, as by an artist of the stage. And she went on:
“When a young wife lives by the side of a husband who is not young or amiable, or even kind—in a place such as I have described, something she must love if she is not to die.... Thus Henriette learned to worship a Cause, and to devote herself, heart and soul, to an object. That was the Restoration of the Empire. She lives for it to-day!...”
Her eyes were like green jewels burning under the shadow of her dusky hair-waves. Her voice thrilled and rang and sighed. “Oh, how I thanked you for those words I heard to-night! What man except yourself would have spoken them! Yes—women can be chivalrous!—women can live and die for a conviction! My terrible confession is made easier by your belief!”
She paused and resumed:
“I aided the escape of the Prince Imperial.... I conceived the idea, thought of the disguise—provided the lay-figure that, dressed in Prince Louis Napoleon’s clothes, lay upon the bed in his prison-cell, while M. Conneau kept guard over the supposed sick man. And I gloried in the success of the enterprise, and every louis I could obtain has since been spent in furthering the Imperial cause. Ah, Heaven! how poor its only hope has been!—he who should wield a scepter, he who should have dipped his hands at will in a treasury of milliards! How poor he still is, it pierces the heart to know. Yet how many have exhausted their resources in supplying that need of his: General Montguichet and M. de Combeville have been reduced to penury, Princess Mathilde and the Comtesse de Thierry-Robec are impoverished by their gifts! Noble, self-sacrificing women!—without envying I have emulated them.... You see these rubies that I wear? Who would guess the stones were false?”