France -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English; Italy -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
He came and went through their lines, and suddenly took Count Martin by
the shoulders, shook him and dragged him, exclaiming: "A throne is four
pieces of wood covered with velvet? No! A throne is a man, and that man
is I. You have tried to throw mud at me. Is this the time to
remonstrate with me when there are two hundred thousand Cossacks at the
frontiers? Your Laine is a wicked man. One should wash one's dirty
linen at home." And while in his anger he twisted in his hand the
embroidered collar of the deputy, he said: "The people know me. They do
not know you. I am the elect of the nation. You are the obscure
delegates of a department." He predicted to them the fate of the
Girondins. The noise of his spurs accompanied the sound of his voice.
Count Martin remained trembling the rest of his life, and tremblingly
recalled the Bourbons after the defeat of the Emperor. The two
restorations were in vain; the July government and the Second Empire
covered his oppressed breast with crosses and cordons. Raised to the
highest functions, loaded with honors by three kings and one emperor, he
felt forever on his shoulder the hand of the Corsican. He died a senator
of Napoleon III, and left a son agitated by the same fear.
This son had married Mademoiselle Belleme, daughter of the first
president of the court of Bourges, and with her the political glories of
a family which gave three ministers to the moderate monarch. The
Bellemes, advocates in the time of Louis XV, elevated the Jacobin origins
of the Martins. The second Count Martin was a member of all the
Assemblies until his death in 1881. His son took without trouble his
seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Having married Mademoiselle Therese
Montessuy, whose dowry supported his political fortune, he appeared
discreetly among the four or five bourgeois, titled and wealthy, who
rallied to democracy, and were received without much bad grace by the
republicans, whom aristocracy flattered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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