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Updated: June 16, 2025
How strange! how inexplicable! Candeille took the necklace up in her trembling fingers and gazed musingly at the priceless gems. She had seen the jewels before, long, long ago! round the neck of the Duchesse de Marny, in whose service her own mother had been.
"Ah! then I know why your face from the first seemed familiar to me," said Marguerite, this time with unaffected cordiality. "I must have applauded you many a time in the olden days. I am an ex-colleague, you know. My name was St. Just before I married, and I was of the Maison Moliere." "I knew that," said Desiree Candeille, "and half hoped that you would remember me."
The salons were filled with flowers and beautiful women; among them the majestic Madame Vestris, and the lovely Mademoiselle Candeille, who was singing a song when there arose a sudden indescribable noise, growing louder and louder, and then the cry of MARAT! MARAT! and the "Friend of the People" entered.
"Am I to understand then, Sir Percy," said Chauvelin, "that you are prepared to apologize to Mademoiselle Candeille for this insults offered to her by Lady Blakeney?" Sir Percy again tried to smother that tiresome little yawn, which seemed most distressing, when he desired to be most polite.
That unaccountable feeling of unreality was still upon her, that sense that she, and the woman Candeille, Percy and even His Royal Highness were, for the time being, the actors in a play written and stage-managed by Chauvelin. The ex-ambassador's humility, his offers of friendship, his quietude under Sir Percy's good-humoured banter, everything was a sham.
Demoiselle Candeille, an actress, was selected for her beauty; but she was not a "harlot," and she was not undressed. Whoever turns to such an accessible account as Carlyle's will see that the apologists of Christianity have utterly misrepresented the scene. Secondly, it is asserted that the Revolution was a tornado of murder; cruelty was let loose, and the Atheists waded in blood.
She put the necklace round her shapely neck and Fanchon looked to see that the clasp was quite secure. There came the sound of loud knocking at the street door. "That is M. Chauvelin come to fetch me with the chaise. Am I quite ready, Fanchon?" asked Desiree Candeille. "Oh yes, Mademoiselle!" sighed the little maid; "and Mademoiselle looks very beautiful to-night."
"Sir Percy," retorted Chauvelin firmly, "since you will not offer Mademoiselle Candeille the apology which she has the right to expect from you, are you prepared that you and I should cross swords like honourable gentlemen?"
With a great effort now, Chauvelin pulled himself together and, though his voice still trembled, he managed to speak with a certain amount of calm: "Probably, Sir Percy, you know," he said, "that throughout the whole of France we are inaugurating a series of national fetes, in honour of the new religion which the people are about to adopt.... Demoiselle Desiree Candeille, whom you know, will at these festivals impersonate the Goddess of Reason, the only deity whom we admit now in France.... She has been specially chosen for this honour, owing to the services which she has rendered us recently... and as Boulogne happens to be the lucky city in which we have succeeded in bringing the Scarlet Pimpernel to justice, the national fete will begin within these city walls, with Demoiselle Candeille as the thrice-honoured goddess."
False, theatrical and stagy as Marguerite had originally suspected she appeared to have been in league with Chauvelin to bring about this undesirable meeting. Lady Blakeney turned from one to another, trying to conceal her contempt beneath a mask of passionless indifference. Candeille was standing close by, looking obviously distressed and not a little puzzled.
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