Recovered after a while, under shelter of the great staircase, she wept as those weep whose heart is broken by a great blow. Claude, without a word, sustained, soothed her. A sentiment of gratitude mingled itself with her distress. "How good he is!" she thought.
"It was a pity," says her mother a little later "a pity you did not see the Cordons Bleus. Fancy! You will laugh at me! But in one of the handsomest of the Chevaliers I felt sure I recognized the stranger who helped us at the Sainte Chapelle, and was so gallant with you."
Phlipote did not laugh. "You are deceived, mother!" she said in a faint voice. "Pardi!" cries the father. "'Tis what I always say. Your stranger was some young fellow from a shop."
Two months later the young people receive [148] the nuptial benediction, and continue the musical business when the elders retire to the country. At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a good and devoted husband. Phlipote never again opened her lips regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her heart: only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which seemed to seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a brilliant but chimeric image visible for her alone.
And once again she saw him. It was in the terrible year 1794. She knew the hour at which the tumbril with those condemned to die passed the windows; and at the first signal would close them and draw the curtain. But on this day some invincible fascination nailed her to her place. There were ten faces; but she had eyes for one alone. She had not forgotten, could not mistake, him—that pale head, so proud and fine, but now thin with suffering; the beautiful mobile eyes, now encircled with the signs of sorrow and watching. The convict's shirt, open in large, broad folds, left bare the neck, delicate as a woman's, and made for that youthful face an aureole, of innocence, of martyrdom. His looks [149] met hers. Did he recognize her? She could not have said. She remained there, paralyzed with emotion, till the moment when the vision disappeared.
Then she flung herself into her chamber, fell on her knees, lost herself in prayer. There was a distant roll of drums. The man to whom she had given her maiden soul was gone.
"Cursed be their anger, for it was cruel!" says the reader. But Monsieur Filon's stories sometimes end as merrily as they begin; and always he is all delicacy—a delicacy which keeps his large yet minute antiquarian knowledge of that vanished time ever in service to a direct interest in humanity as it is permanently, alike before and after '93. His book is certainly one well worth possessing.
THE END
16th July 1890