Yet, a month before, I had been conscious of a little run of pity, that was like a sloughing of the old wound of nobility. It was to see the figure of him I had called Sire heavily seated in that same _Salle de Manège_, his attire, appropriately, a drab surtout--the colour of new-turned mould--his powdered hair blotted with a tonsure where he had leaned his weary head back for rest, that lost look on his ineffectual face--“Messieurs! this strange indignity! But doubtless the saints will explain to me of what I am accused.” Bah! have I not learned the “Rights of Man,” and seen them illustrated, too, on those days of the “severe justice of the people.” The worse the decomposition below, the thicker will be the scum that rises to the top. But there the wholesome air shall deodorise it by-and-by, and the waters of life be sweet to the taste again--for a time. And in the meanwhile I browse by the _abattoir_. On that Saturday evening, the last of the voting, I dined with distinction at Février’s in the Palais Royal. I could still afford, morally and materially, this little practice of self-indulgence; for they had not yet begun to make bread of dried pease, and many of the ardent Deputies themselves were admirable connoisseurs in meat and wine. While I was sitting--the whole place being in a ferment of scurry and babble--a couple, who awakened my curious interest, entered and took a vacant table next to mine. A withered old man it was and a young girl, who sauntered with ample grace in his wake. The first came down the room, prying hither and thither, bowelless and bent like a note of interrogation. He was buttoned up to the throat in a lank dark-green surtout, and his plain hat was tilted back from his forehead, so as to show his eyebrows, each lifted and lost in the creases of a dozen arched wrinkles, and the papery lids beneath them bulging and half closed. His face was all run into grey sharpness, but a conciliatory smile was a habit of his lips. He carried his hands behind his back as if they were manacled there. The girl who followed was in features and complexion cold and beautiful. Her eyes were stone-grey under well-marked brows; her forehead rounded from her nose like a kitten’s; the curls that escaped from beneath her furred hood were of a rich walnut brown. She had that colourless serenity in her face that is like snow over perfumed flowers. Gazing on such, one longs to set one’s heart to the chill and melt it and see the blossoms break. Now I had at once recognised in this couple the sustainers of the principal _rôles_ in a certain September tragedy _entr’acte_. In these times of feverish movement the manner in which Casimir had secured their escape was indeed an old story with me; yet, seeing them again under these vastly improved circumstances, and remembering in what way I had sought to assist them, my heart was moved beyond its present custom to a feeling of sympathetic comradeship with one, at least, of the two.