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“Shush,” cried Maurice. “She’s talking again, I think.”

“Oh! Words here and there, unintelligible,” said Dixmer.

“Maurice,” murmured Geneviève, “they’re going to kill Maurice. Go to him, Knight, go to him!”

A profound silence followed these words.

“Maison-Rouge,” murmured Geneviève. “Maison-Rouge!”

Maurice felt a lightning flash of suspicion, but it was just a flash. In any case, he was too upset by Geneviève’s suffering to comment on what she said.

“Did you call a doctor?” he asked.

“Oh! It’s nothing,” said Dixmer. “She’s a bit delirious, that’s all.”

He squeezed his wife’s arm so hard that Geneviève came to and, giving a small shriek, opened eyes that until then she had held tightly shut.

“Ah, here you all are,” she said, “and Maurice with you. Oh! I’m so happy to see you, my friend; if you only knew how I …”

She recovered herself in time: “We’ve really been through a lot these last two days!”

“Yes,” said Maurice, “we’re all here; so you can stop worrying, stop scaring yourself with such terrors. There is one name in particular, you know, that you must get used to not saying anymore, given that it no longer has the slightest whiff of sanctity.”

“What name is that?” Geneviève shot out.

“The name of the Knight of Maison-Rouge.”

“I named the Knight of Maison-Rouge, did I?” asked Geneviève, horrified.

“Funnily enough,” said Dixmer with a forced laugh. “But you understand, Maurice, there’s nothing funny in that, really, since they’re saying publicly that he was the accomplice of the Tison girl and that it was he who directed the escape attempt that, happily, came to grief yesterday.”

“I’m not saying there’s anything funny in it,” replied Maurice. “I’m just saying he’d better keep himself hidden.”

“Who?” asked Dixmer.

“The Knight of Maison-Rouge! Who do you think! The Commune is looking for him and its bloodhounds have pretty good noses.”

“Let’s hope they get him,” said Morand, “before he comes up with some other scheme that he pulls off better than this last one.”

“In any case,” said Maurice, “it won’t involve helping the Queen.”

“Why not?” asked Morand.

“Because the Queen is now beyond help—even his.”

“Where is she, then?” asked Dixmer.

“In the Conciergerie,” said Maurice. “They took her there last night.”

Dixmer, Morand, and Geneviève all gave a cry that Maurice took for an exclamation of surprise.

“So you see,” he continued, “that’s it for the plans of the Queen’s chevalier! The Conciergerie is a bit more secure than the Temple.”

Morand and Dixmer exchanged a look that Maurice missed.

“Oh, my God!” he cried. “Madame Dixmer’s gone very pale again.”

“Geneviève,” Dixmer said to his wife, “you must get into bed, my child, you aren’t well.”

Maurice picked up that he was being dismissed; he kissed Geneviève’s hand and left, accompanied by Morand as far as the old rue Saint-Jacques. There Morand left him to say a few words to a servant who was holding a horse all saddled. Maurice was so preoccupied he didn’t even ask Morand, to whom he had not addressed a word since they’d left the house together, who the man was and what the horse was doing there.

He took the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor and reached the embankment.

“It’s strange,” he said to himself as he walked along. “Is it my mind that’s growing dim? Or are things getting weightier? Everything looks bigger to me, as though I’m seeing it all through a microscope.”

To get back a bit of serenity, Maurice held his face up to the night breeze and leaned against the parapet of the bridge.

29

THE PATROL

Maurice was silently completing this reflection, leaning on the parapet of the bridge and watching the water flow past with that melancholy attention whose symptoms can be found in any Parisian born and bred, when he heard a small troop coming his way, in step like a patrol.

He turned round; it was a company of the National Guard, arriving from the far side of the river. Maurice thought he could make out Lorin in the darkness. It was Lorin, in fact, and as soon as he saw Maurice he ran to him with open arms.

“It’s you!” cried Lorin. “At last!