She snapped her fingers right into their faces with an impudence that was positively sublime. The cowards were taken aback. They looked at each other, and burst out laughing.
“Sapristi! She's right,” exclaimed one of them; “they're not worth wasting our powder on!”
Like lightning, the women were on their feet, fraternizing with the men, embracing, shaking hands, and swearing fraternity in true communistic fashion. Mlle. de Lemaque alone stood aloof, a silent, terror-stricken spectator of the scene.
“What have we here? Une canaille d'aristocrate, I'll be bound! It's written on her face,” said one of the ruffians, seizing her by the arm; “let us make away with her, comrades! It will be a good job for the Republic to rid it of one more of the lazy aristos that live by the ouvrier's meat.” There was a lull in the kissing and hand-shaking, and they turned to stare at Aline. Her life hung by a thread. A timid word, a guilty look, and she was lost. But the soldier's blood rose up in her; she bethought her of her abus, and lancéd it.
“Lazy!” she cried; “I am a soldier's daughter; my father fought for France, and left his children nothing but his sword; I work for my bread as hard as any of you!”
The effect was galvanic; they gathered around her, shouting, “Bravo! Give us your hand, citoyenne!”
And Aline gave it, and, like the statesman who thanked God he had a country to sell, she blessed him that she had a hand to give.
—Blood ran like water in the sewers of Paris for a few days, and then the troops were masters of the field, and order was restored—restored so far as to enable honest men to sleep in their beds at night.
Mme. de Chanoir was back again in the little saloon at No. 13, and diligently reading the newspaper aloud to a gentleman who was lying on the sofa near her; the générale's spine complaint had been radically cured by the Commune, and she sat erect in a chair now like other people. The invalid's face and head were so elaborately bandaged that it was impossible to see what either were like, while his bodily proportions disappeared altogether under a voluminous travelling-rug. He listened for some time without comment to the political tirade which Mme. de Chanoir was reading to him, an invective against France, and her soldiers, and her generals, and the nation at large—a sweeping anathema, in fact, of everything and everybody, till he could bear it no longer, and, sitting bolt upright, he exclaimed:
“Madame, the man who wrote that article is a traitor. France is greater to-day in her unmerited misfortunes than she was in the apotheosis of her glory; she is more sublime in her widowed grief than her ignoble foe in his barbarous successes! She is, in fact, still France. The situation is compromised for a moment, but—”