“If you can make me out an aristocrat,” I exclaimed, “I will kiss it.”
“What have you got here in your hand?” cried the sans-culotte, snatching the bottles from me.
“Only medicines for a sick man,” I replied.
He tore off the paper, however, opened one of the bottles and put it to his mouth, then spat upon the ground with a blasphemous oath, exclaiming—“He is only a garçon apothecaire. Let him pass, let him pass! He will kill as many sacre aristocrats with his cursed drugs as we can with the guillotine. Let the imp pass. His is a trade that should be encouraged.”
Thus saying, he marched on, and his fierce and malignant companions followed. I cannot say that I was in reality at all frightened. Every thing had passed so quickly that I had not had time to become alarmed; but I felt bewildered, and paused for a moment to gather my senses together after the mob had passed into the Place du Petit Chatelet which was close at hand. I was still standing there when I heard a voice saying, “Louis, Louis.”
I looked round, but could see nobody, and the only place from which the sound could proceed, appeared to be one of those open doors so common in Paris at the time, with a dark passage beyond it.
“Louis, Louis,” said the voice again; “come in here, I want to speak to you.”
It was not the tongue of Mariette certainly; for her sweet, child-like tones I should have known any where; and I hesitated whether I should go in or not. I resolved not to seem cowardly, however, and walked into the passage. I could then see faintly, a tall, and as it appeared to me, graceful figure move on before me, and I followed into a little room quite at the back of the house, to which the light was admitted from a little court behind. There the figure turned as I entered, and I beheld Madame de Salins.
The room itself presented a painful picture of poverty. It could not have been above ten feet square, and in one corner, without curtains, or any shelter from the wind, was the bed of Madame de Salins herself, and close by it a little bed for her daughter. The latter, indeed, was fenced round with a shawl hung upon two chairs, which only left one in the room vacant. A table, a broken looking-glass, a few cups and glasses, with a coffee-pot standing by the fire, seemed to form all the other furniture of the chamber. I had very little time to look round me; for Madame de Salins at once began to inquire after the health of Father Bonneville.
“I saw you from a front window,” she said, as soon as I had answered her first questions, “and feared that those men would maltreat you; for they have the hearts of tigers, and spare no one.”