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Updated: June 2, 2025
Albert de Chantonnay was arrested at Tours, and is now in La Rochelle. We may escape we may get away to-night " He paused and looked hurriedly toward the door, for some one was coming up the stairs some one who wore sabots. It was the servant, Marie, who came unceremoniously into the room with the exaggerated calm of one who realises the gravity of the situation and means to master it.
He seemed to know the shawls, for he disentangled them with skill and laid them aside, one by one. The Comtesse de Chantonnay breathed a little more freely, but no friendly hand could disencumber her of the mountains of flesh, which must have weighed down any heart less buoyant and courageous. "Ah, bah!" she cried, gaily. "Who is afraid? What could they do to an old woman?
She looked at her fan with a gleam of ill-concealed irony and glanced over it toward Albert de Chantonnay, who, with a consideration which must have been hereditary, was uneasy about the alteration he had made in his whiskers. It was perhaps unfair, he felt, to harrow young and tender hearts. It was at this moment that a loud knock commanded a breathless silence, for no more guests were expected.
Behind her, the Marquis de Gemosac, Albert de Chantonnay, his mother, and all the Royalists of the province, gathered in a semicircle, by accident or some tacit instinct, leaving only the girl standing out in front, beneath the chandelier. They bowed with that grave self-possession which falls like a cloak over the shoulders of such as are of ancient and historic lineage.
"But, surely, I am to read it to myself first," was the retort; "or else how can I give it proper value?" There may be some who refuse to take seriously a person like Albert de Chantonnay because, forsooth, he happened to possess a sense of the picturesque. There are, as a matter of fact, thousands of sensible persons in the British Isles who fail completely to understand the average Frenchman.
At this moment, Albert de Chantonnay entered the room. He was enveloped in a long black cloak, which he threw off his shoulders and cast over the back of a chair, not without an obvious appreciation of its possibilities of the picturesque. He looked round the room with a mild eye, which refused to lend itself to mystery or a martial ruthlessness.
It might have been Madame de Chantonnay who spoke, with all that lady's vast experience of life and without any of her folly. "You think I am pretty. Perhaps I am. Just pretty enough to enable you to pretend, and you have pretended very well at times. You are good at pretending, one must conclude. Oh! I bear no ill-will ..."
Albert de Chantonnay was arrested at Tours, and is now in La Rochelle. We may escape we may get away to-night " He paused and looked hurriedly toward the door, for some one was coming up the stairs some one who wore sabots. It was the servant, Marie, who came unceremoniously into the room with the exaggerated calm of one who realises the gravity of the situation and means to master it.
In the absence of the Marquis de Gemosac, Albert de Chantonnay was considered to be the leader of the party in that quiet corner of south-western France which lies north of Bordeaux and south of that great dividing river, the Loire.
"I have so much to do," he whispered. "So much to think of. We are leaving no stone unturned, and at last we have a clue." The other guests gathered round. "But speak, my dear friend, speak," cried Madame de Chantonnay. "You keep us in suspense. Look around you. We are among friends, as you see. It is only ourselves."
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