She raised her hands above her head, and began to dance with small steps on the pavement-stone on which she stood, without leaving it. All at once she burst into a peal of laughter and exclaimed: 'Do you know, good Parisians, what I did to Berthier?'
Some of the officials of the church and those belonging to the undertaker, advanced to remove her. But the crowd were in the humour to listen to her and to observe her, and they shouted to them to touch the lady at their peril.
'Do you know, good people, what I did?' she asked again. 'No, you cannot guess. He came to visit me in my cell, and I cast my yellow angel—my cat, into his face, and it tore him. I saw the streaks of blood. Ah ha! I hate him.' She knit her hands; her eyes glared like those of a tigress, she became rigid in every limb. 'Promise me, good people, if you find him, you will kill him. Hang him to the lantern, and make him blue like me. I have seen a dead man dangling from a beam—and his face was like mine. Let Berthier become M. Plomb. Promise me not to spare him—swear to me.'
The answer was thundered by several thousand voices—'We swear.'
'Will you curse him? See!' she ran to the church door and tore down a long strip of crape powdered with silver flames, and threw it over her like a cope—'See!' she cried, 'I will be your priestess, leading your curses and your prayers. Curse for me, Berthier de Sauvigny!' She lifted one arm. Her bonnet had fallen, and her ash-grey hair fell wildly about her flame-strewn vestment, which she held about her with her other hand. 'Curse him wherever he be. Cry out anathema!' She mounted the bier, and stood before the coffin. 'Curse him waking, and curse him sleeping.'
The people, falling in with her mad humour, or carried away by the wildness of the scene and her actions, responded,—
'Anathema!'
'Curse him eating, and curse him drinking.'
'Anathema!'
'Curse him in his moments of laughter and mirth, and in his times of sorrow and fears.'