But after those ruthless words she hid her face in her hands, and sat down silently.
The next day a man presented himself without being announced.His face was stern.It was Hulot, followed by Corentin.Mademoiselle de Verneuil looked at the commandant and trembled.
"You have come," she said, "to ask me to account for your friends.
They are dead."
"I know it," he replied, "and not in the service of the Republic.""For me, and by me," she said."You preach the nation to me.Can the nation bring to life those who die for her? Can she even avenge them?
But I--I will avenge them!" she cried.The awful images of the catastrophe filled her imagination suddenly, and the graceful creature who held modesty to be the first of women's wiles forgot herself in a moment of madness, and marched towards the amazed commandant brusquely.
"In exchange for a few murdered soldiers," she said, "I will bring to the block a head that is worth a million heads of other men.It is not a woman's business to wage war; but you, old as you are, shall learn good stratagems from me.I'll deliver a whole family to your bayonets --him, his ancestors, his past, his future.I will be as false and treacherous to him as I was good and true.Yes, commandant, I will bring that little noble to my arms, and he shall leave them to go to death.I have no other rival.The wretch himself pronounced his doom, --/a day without a morrow/.Your Republic and I shall be avenged.The Republic!" she cried in a voice the strange intonations of which horrified Hulot."Is he to die for bearing arms against the nation?
Shall I suffer France to rob me of my vengeance? Ah! what a little thing is life! death can expiate but one crime.He has but one head to fall, but I will make him know in one night that he loses more than life.Commandant, you who will kill him," and she sighed, "see that nothing betrays my betrayal; he must die convinced of my fidelity.Iask that of you.Let him know only me--me, and my caresses!"She stopped; but through the crimson of her cheeks Hulot and Corentin saw that rage and delirium had not entirely smothered all sense of shame.Marie shuddered violently as she said the words; she seemed to listen to them as though she doubted whether she herself had said them, and she made the involuntary movement of a woman whose veil is falling from her.
"But you had him in your power," said Corentin.
"Very likely."
"Why did you stop me when I had him?" asked Hulot.
"I did not know what he would prove to be," she cried.Then, suddenly, the excited woman, who was walking up and down with hurried steps and casting savage glances at the spectators of the storm, calmed down."Ido not know myself," she said, in a man's tone."Why talk? I must go and find him.""Go and find him?" said Hulot."My dear woman, take care; we are not yet masters of this part of the country; if you venture outside of the town you will be taken or killed before you've gone a hundred yards.""There's never any danger for those who seek vengeance," she said, driving from her presence with a disdainful gesture the two men whom she was ashamed to face.