End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Science fiction; Twenty-first century -- Fiction
She became an easy prey to the methodist; her sensibility and acute
fears rendered her accessible to every impulse; her love for her child
made her eager to cling to the merest straw held out to save him. Her
mind, once unstrung, and now tuned by roughest inharmonious hands, made
her credulous: beautiful as fabled goddess, with voice of unrivalled
sweetness, burning with new lighted enthusiasm, she became a stedfast
proselyte, and powerful auxiliary to the leader of the elect. I had
remarked her in the crowd, on the day we met on the Place Vendome; and,
recollecting suddenly her providential rescue of my lost one, on the
night of the twentieth of November, I reproached myself for my neglect
and ingratitude, and felt impelled to leave no means that I could adopt
untried, to recall her to her better self, and rescue her from the
fangs of the hypocrite destroyer.
I will not, at this period of my story, record the artifices I used to
penetrate the asylum of the Tuileries, or give what would be a tedious
account of my stratagems, disappointments, and perseverance. I at last
succeeded in entering these walls, and roamed its halls and corridors
in eager hope to find my selected convert. In the evening I contrived
to mingle unobserved with the congregation, which assembled in the
chapel to listen to the crafty and eloquent harangue of their prophet.
I saw Juliet near him. Her dark eyes, fearfully impressed with the
restless glare of madness, were fixed on him; she held her infant, not
yet a year old, in her arms; and care of it alone could distract her
attention from the words to which she eagerly listened. After the
sermon was over, the congregation dispersed; all quitted the chapel
except she whom I sought; her babe had fallen asleep; so she placed it
on a cushion, and sat on the floor beside, watching its tranquil
slumber.
I presented myself to her; for a moment natural feeling produced a
sentiment of gladness, which disappeared again, when with ardent and
affectionate exhortation I besought her to accompany me in flight from
this den of superstition and misery. In a moment she relapsed into the
delirium of fanaticism, and, but that her gentle nature forbade, would
have loaded me with execrations. She conjured me, she commanded me to
leave her— “Beware, O beware,” she cried, “fly while yet your escape is
practicable. Now you are safe; but strange sounds and inspirations come
on me at times, and if the Eternal should in awful whisper reveal to me
his will, that to save my child you must be sacrificed, I would call in
the satellites of him you call the tyrant; they would tear you limb
from limb; nor would I hallow the death of him whom Idris loved, by a
single tear.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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