"`I am sorry,' he said. `I did not know. I thought of him as when I saw him five years ago.' "`Ah, yes,' said Nanette; `but since then he is much changed. And he worships the very ground our young lady stands on. No wonder! what _would_ he have been but for her and her mother? For neither his father nor mother can bear the sight of him.' "`Poor fellow,' said Pierre. `Then _he_ cannot be much of a protector to our ladies in case of need.' "`No indeed,' said Madame Delmar. And from that moment Pierre only thought of his childish enemy with profound pity." CHAPTER EIGHT. "As a rule, news, even of great importance, travelled very slowly in those days. But not long after the return of Nanette there came to Valmont, as to even far remoter corners of France, with a rush like that of a mighty wind, tidings of the first tremendous outburst of the great storm--the assault and taking of the prison of the Bastille by the infuriated mob. My mother well remembers that day in Paris. The terror which spread through all classes--the strange stories which were afloat about the wretched prisoners released from the dungeons, where some of them had been confined till they had forgotten not only the crime-- imaginary in many cases--for which they had been punished, but even their own names and histories! The destruction of the terrible Bastille can never be regretted, but it was accompanied by dreadful deeds. The murder of the governor and other officers who were but doing their duty; for the people, maddened by hunger as well as by their many wrongs, did not stop to consider which were the guilty and which the innocent. I have said to my mother that from this point I wish she would take this narrative into her own hands. It seems to me that as an eye-witness-- for in this year 1789, she was an intelligent girl of nearly thirteen-- she could describe with much more force and vividness many of the scenes which followed. But she begs me to continue as I have begun. The story concerns my father quite as much as herself, she says, and she wishes it to be written as much from his recollections, which he has often related to me, as from her own. So I must do my best, sadly imperfect though I feel it to be.