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By Root 644 0

out arcades with wooden beams, sunless nooks and crannies, something like twenty dubious, rotting doors. It was destitution in all its ugliness. Here and there was a garden, enclosed either by hedges or by fences made of stakes, a few by walls, and there were skins drying out in sheds and giving off that nauseating tannery smell that makes you want to heave. Maurice poked around for two hours and found nothing, gleaned nothing. He retraced his steps a dozen times to reorient himself. But all his efforts were in vain, all his forays fruitless. All traces of the woman seemed to have been erased by fog and rain.

“So,” Maurice said to himself, “I was dreaming. This cesspit can’t have served my beautiful fairy of last night as a refuge for a single moment.”

This fierce republican had a poetry in him different from, but just as real as, the poetry of his friend of the old-fashioned anacreontic quatrains, for he carried that idea home with him, so as not to dim the halo shimmering over his mystery woman’s head. True, he went home in despair.

“Adieu,” he sighed, “beautiful stranger. You’ve played me for a fool or a child. Would she have brought me here if she actually lived here! Not on your life! She merely passed through like a swan on a foul bog. And like a bird on the wing, she’s left no trace.”

6

THE TEMPLE

That same day, while Maurice was going back over the pont de la Tournelle in acute disappointment, several municipal officers, accompanied by the commander of the National Guard of Paris, Santerre, were paying a grim visit to the tower of the Temple, which had been turned into a prison since the thirteenth of August 1792.

The visit was centered on the apartment on the third floor, comprising an antechamber and three rooms. One of these rooms was occupied by two women, a young girl, and a boy of nine, all dressed in mourning.

The elder of the two women could have been thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old. She was sitting reading a book. The second woman was sitting and working on a hoop of tapestry. She could have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old. The girl was fourteen and kept close to the boy, who was lying down sick with his eyes closed as though he were asleep, although it was obviously impossible to sleep with the racket the municipal officers were making.

A number of them were shoving the beds around, others were unfolding articles of linen; still others, having completed their search, were staring insolently at the unhappy female prisoners, who kept their eyes resolutely lowered, one on her book, the other on her tapestry, the third on her brother.

The elder of the two women was tall, pale, and beautiful. As she read, she seemed to be concentrating her attention entirely on her book, though no doubt her eyes alone were doing the reading, not her mind.

One of the municipal officers walked over to her, snatched the book out of her hands, and threw it on the floor in the middle of the room. The prisoner stretched her hand toward the table, took a second volume, and began reading that. The Montagnard made a furious move to tear this second volume from her, but as he did so, the prisoner busy embroidering next to the window started to tremble; the young girl shot forward, put her arms round the reader, and quietly sobbed, “Ah, my poor mother!” giving her mother a kiss.

The prisoner pressed her lips against the young girl’s ear as though kissing her back, but instead she whispered, “Marie,1 there is a note hidden in the mouth of the stove; get rid of it.”

“That will do! Enough!” cried the municipal officer, jerking the girl away from her mother. “Enough canoodling for one day!”

“Monsieur,” said the girl. “Has the Convention banned children from kissing their mothers?”

“No; but it has decreed that traitors, aristocrats, and former aristocrats will be punished. That’s why we’re here to conduct an interrogation. So let’s get on with it, Antoinette. Answer.”

The woman so grossly addressed did not even deign to look in her interrogator’s direction. On the contrary, she turned her head away, her