It was he, and such as he, that deluged France with blood. The measure of their iniquity ran over. But the Bourbons were ever an accursed race. The property of the mother was seized upon by the emissaries of the police; and when a few years afterwards, she was released from her imprisonment, it was to find herself a homeless outcast, and her daughter,--the beauteous child of her soul's affections,--the inmate of a madhouse. Kings should be the protectors, the benefactors of their subjects; not their bane, their curse, the agents of their torture. Monsieur, that woman was my relative, and early did she stamp upon my young heart that hatred to royalty which remains unconquerably the same to this very hour. Yes, here it is," and he pressed his hand with energetic firmness over the seat of life; "here,--here it is, and, like a memorial carved on the bark of a sapling, it has become enlarged with my growth, and deeper indented with my years. It is my fate, monsieur,--it is my fate. "The days of my boyhood passed on in mental misery. I felt for the injuries that had been heaped upon my only friend; I yielded to her instructions to be prepared against the hour of vengeance, when retributive justice should sweep tyranny from the throne; I nursed the hope in the secret recesses of my breast; I cherished it in my heart's core; it was the subject of my nightly dreams and waking thoughts; and, whilst other lads sought amusement in boyish pastimes, the demon of revenge led me into solitary nooks, where I hoarded up my ardent desire to redress the wrongs of Madame T----. Such, monsieur, was Jacques Begaud in his thirteenth year, when, tired of a vegetative life, I quitted my uncle's house, which, though it had been a place of shelter, had never been a home to me, and travelled on foot to Toulon. My small stock of money was soon expended; but yet I wanted for nothing. A piece of bread and a little fruit, with some wine, no one denied me; and, monsieur, I felt the sweets of liberty. Why I went to Toulon I do not know, for Paris was my aim; and Madame T---- had prophesied,--there was something terrible in her denunciations,--she had prophesied desolation and destruction to the house of the Bourbons; and as rumours were spreading of disunion at court, so did she eagerly feed upon them, and urge me to redress her wrongs. It is true the debauchee was in his grave; but then there was his grandson, the celebration of whose marriage had made me an orphan even before my birth; and, boy as I was, with a mind care-worn and cankered, I even looked upon _that_ event as a legitimate cause of hatred." "But the star, the star!" exclaimed Lord Eustace; "I am anxious to learn in what manner you considered yourself influenced by the star."