France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Fiction
The sight of Anne Mie's pathetic little face as she brought her food and
delicacies and various little comforts, was positive torture to the
poor, harrowed soul.
At every sound in the great, silent house she started up, quivering with
apprehension and horror. Had the sword of Damocles, which she herself
had suspended, already fallen over the heads of those who had shown her
nothing but kindness?
She could not think of Madame Déroulède or of Anne Mie without the most
agonising, the most torturing shame.
And what of him--the man she had so remorselessly, so ruthlessly
betrayed to a tribunal which would know no mercy?
Juliette dared not think of him.
She had never tried to analyse her feelings with regard to him. At the
time of Charlotte Corday's trial, when his sonorous voice rang out in
its pathetic appeal for the misguided woman, Juliette had given him
ungrudging admiration. She remembered now how strongly his magnetic
personality had roused in her a feeling of enthusiasm for the poor girl,
who had come from the depths of her quiet provincial home, in order to
accomplish the horrible deed which would immortalise her name through
all the ages to come, and cause her countrymen to proclaim her "greater
than Brutus."
Déroulède was pleading for the life of that woman, and it was his very
appeal which had aroused Juliette's dormant energy, for the cause which
her dead father had enjoined her not to forget. It was Déroulède again
whom she had seen but a few weeks ago, standing alone before the mob who
would have torn her to pieces, haranguing them on her behalf, speaking
to them with that quiet, strong voice of his, ruling them with the rule
of love and pity, and turning their wrath to gentleness.
Did she hate him, then?
Surely, surely she hated him for having thrust himself into her life,
for having caused her brother's death and covered her father's declining
years with sorrow. And, above all, she hated him--indeed, indeed it was
hate!--for being the cause of this most hideous action of her life: an
action to which she had been driven against her will, one of basest
ingratitude and treachery, foreign to every sentiment within her heart,
cowardly, abject, the unconscious outcome of this strange magnetism
which emanated from him and had cast a spell over her, transforming her
individuality and will power, and making of her an unconscious and
automatic instrument of Fate.
She would not speak of God's finger again: it was Fate--pagan, devilish
Fate!--the weird, shrivelled women who sit and spin their interminable
thread. They had decreed; and Juliette, unable to fight, blind and
broken by the conflict, had succumbed to the Megaeras and their
relentless wheel.
At length silence and loneliness became unendurable. She called
Pétronelle, and ordered her to pack her boxes.
"We leave for England to-day", she said curtly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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