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and, let me tell you, that method is not in keeping with the honour of the army-you would not have me on your arm at this moment!'

The gay, fearless laugh rang out once again.

It did but intensify the silence of grinning hate on every face.

Stylite walked first, accompanied by the préfet, Maurice Duval; Guibourg and de Mesnard brought up the rear. Between them went Madame, leaning on Dermoncourt; the National Guard and two regiments of the line formed a double hedge on either side. It was all they could do to resist the multitudes behind, but they stood to their arms. Not a whisper was heard as Madame came down the steps, her cheek flushed, her eyes feverishly bright. Someone had thrown a cloak round her, and she was wearing a large black hat that belonged to mademoiselle du Guiny. She reached the middle of the courtyard in perfect stillness. As the gate was thrown open, a low growl spread from rank to rank behind the soldiers, and someone cursed the duchess.

Dermoncourt stopped, his black eyes flashing fury. 'Where is the respect due to prisoners-above all, when those prisoners are women?'

The noise ceased.

He walked on at the same pace as before.

Through the gate over the drawbridge! The great gates of the Castle closed.

She was safe. She was gone for ever.

CHAPTER XXXV

MAISON BOTHEREL

IN what had been once the spacious drawing-room of some great lady of the time of the Pompadour, a numerous company of the most distinguished and the most rebellious sons of the gay city of Paris were assembled. The walls were undergoing decoration at the hands of such a body of house-painters as had never gathered together there before. The tall pier-glasses multiplied the number. There were so many of these that each one had before him, as he worked, the living image of his comrade, crouched like himself on a ladder, a rose behind his ear, a cigarette between his lips, a palette on his wrist. The room resounded with the noise they made, as one after the other trolled out some fragment of a Ballad of Victor Hugo—some snatch of a Song by Alfred de Musset, which was caught up instantly by more or less harmonious brethren, and echoed, corrected, or supplemented, as the case might be. Sometimes a sudden fury of silence fell upon them all, and then the decoration advanced by leaps and bounds. They were all hard at work except a gentle bird-like youth, who flitted hither and thither among them, his feet scarcely touching the ground as he went.

'People who have not got the needful must have the superfluous,' he remarked, with a sigh of content, at

the end of one of his infrequent pauses. Even poets cannot live on nothing at all.'

'That is very well for you, Gérard de Nerval,' returned another, whose hair was so smooth that it might have been thought he had painted it on to his own head. You are not contributing either the needful or the superfluous. You are extraordinarily unproductive, even for a poet.'

He stepped back to survey, in the critically affectionate manner common to artists of all ages, a group of tipsy Bacchanals, their wreaths of ivy slipped among their wild black locks.

'Yes,' he commented, more to himself than to anyone else, "that thick brute in the corner certainly has a touch of Velasquez!—well, Gérard, what have you to say for yourself?'

'Ungrateful fiend! It was I who invented the ball for the first night of "Le Roi s'Amuse," to begin with. It was I who declared that pictures by the first masters in France would refresh any man who had not the misfortune to be born a bourgeois, better than ices from the Palais Royal. It was I who advised you to crown yourselves with flowers like the ancients, instead of sporting round hats and cod-tail coats.'

'Théo would not wear a round hat and a cod-tail coat to save his life-would you, Théo?' inquired a blue-eyed Raphael, who was painting a Naiad in the white absence of costume peculiar to those ladies.

'Yes, I think so,' said the person addressed, finishing with extreme care a dainty bow of mauve ribbon that looped up the petticoat of the mistress of a picnic à la Watteau with which he intended to fill the space underneath a great oval mirror. He wore a huge pair of

yellow slippers that hailed from Constantinople, and a thick velvet coat, part of which was hidden by the long dark chestnut hair that fell to his waist.

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'I am very much disappointed in you, Théo,' said a gentleman who was busy with a masquerade of Turks at a Carnival; I thought you were a man of principle. Is it true that you knocked down a bourgeois with your fists on the first night of "Hernani"? I am almost afraid you did not.'

'It was not the will that was wanting, but the fists,' said Théo. I take seven-and-a-quarter in gloves. But if I had done the deed, I should never have dared to boast of it in the room with Léon Gozlan here. In the days when he was a pirate, he killed the captain of his ship because the miserable thing was a bourgeois— eh, Léon?'

'Yes,' said a young man like a beautiful Jew, in accents which recalled the sunny shores of his native Marseilles, ‘ I did kill him. But I ate him afterwards, so that every trace of the crime disappeared.'

'I am prepared to kill and eat a bourgeois to-morrow night,' said Théo reflectively. Every one of us must be prepared. It is no common occasion. By the way, I have one seat to spare. No, do not all speak at once! It is not a seat for anybody. It happens to be the very best in the Theatre. I have made up my mind that I will give it only to a duke, or to a new poet. If I do not come across one before to-morrow night, the seat will remain vacant. Hulloa, who comes here?'

A tall fellow whose twenty-one summers had tanned his face to Cordova leather, except for the high bright red on the cheek-bones and a certain marked blackness of eyebrow, strode by in the wake of a less remarkable

companion-looked round as a falcon might look at a troop of doves before he pounced-seized a piece of chalk that belonged to the new Velasquez, sketched in three great palm-trees waving over a mosque, and went out silently as he had entered.

All the other pictures on the wall seemed to die away except the delicate work of one dreamy craftsman high up near the ceiling.

'Excellent!' said he.

It was the first word he had spoken that day; and he worked away the harder at the gray, tufted trees with which he was planting his landscape. His name was Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

'There's a dash of the East about that customer,' said Théo, turning round on the top of his ladder, and taking the cigarette from his mouth. He has a nose like a beak. Cairo gives you a nose like that, it appears, and the sun over there either puts your eyes out or gives you eyes that put out other people's. The East-the country of the dawn- Bah! I can scarcely wink. Come here, Baby!' He laid his hand on the shoulder of the handsome boy who had come in with Prosper Marilhaut, and began to declaim:

'Viens, nous verrons danser les jeunes bayadères
Le soir, lorsque les dromadères

Près des puits du désert s'arrêtent fatigués.'

'What is that?' said the boy, his eyes fixed on the white palm-trees and the mosque.

'A line out of "Les Orientales.":

'What is that?' repeated the boy, as if he were in no way enlightened.

'The masterpiece of Victor Hugo!' came in deep

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