"Why not? How can it be otherwise?" she replied, looking proudly round her. "Can you look round and doubt it, M. le Vicomte?"
"But France?" I said.
"We are France," she retorted with a superb gesture.
And certainly the splendid crowd that filled her rooms was almost warrant for the words; a crowd of stately men and fair women such as I have only seen once or twice since those days. Under the surface there may have been pettiness and senility; the exhaustion of vice; jealousy and lukewarmness and dissension; but the powder and patches, the silks and velvets of the old régime, gave to all a semblance of strength, and at least the appearance of dignity. If few were soldiers, all wore swords and could use them. The fact that the small sword, so powerful a weapon in the duel, is useless against a crowd armed with stones and clubs had not yet been made clear. Nothing seemed more easy than for two or three hundred swordsmen to rule a province.
At any rate I found nothing but what was feasible in the notion; and with little real reluctance, if no great enthusiasm, I pinned on the white cockade. Putting all thoughts of present reform from my mind, I agreed that order--order was the one pressing need of the country.
On that all were agreed, and all were hopeful. I heard no misgivings, but a good deal of vapouring, in which poor M. de Gontaut, with the palsy almost upon him, had his part. No one dropped a hint of danger in the country, or of a revolt of the peasants. Even to me, as I stood in the brilliant crowd, the danger grew to seem so remote and unreal, that, delicacy as well as the fear of ridicule, kept me silent. I could not speak of Mademoiselle without awkwardness, and so the warning which I had come to give died on my lips. I saw that I should be laughed at, I fancied myself deceived, and I was silent.
It was only when, after promising to return next day, I stood at the door prepared to leave, and found myself alone with Louis, that I let a word fall. Then I asked him with a little hesitation if he thought that his sister was quite safe at St. Alais.
"Why not?" he said easily, with his hand on my shoulder.
"The 'trouble is not in the town only," I hinted. "Nor perhaps the worst of the trouble."
He shrugged his shoulders. "You think too much of it, mon cher," he answered. "Believe me, now that we are at one the trouble is over."