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At last she caught a glimpse of the messenger who had summoned her to appear before the bar of the Assembly in reply to the accusations of Viard, informed him of their peril, and implored him to hand her letter to the president. The messenger, M. Rôze, took the paper, and, elbowing his way through the throng, disappeared. An hour elapsed, which seemed an age. The tumult within continued unabated.
I'd have you be most charming to Monsieur Viard. Remember, you are only a hireling, and need give yourself no such fine and unseemly airs." The door just ahead of me was thrown violently open, and out strutted a tiny lady in a most disproportionate rage. She was beautiful neither in face nor figure; she was diminutive, and petulant of manner, but bore herself with an air of almost regal pride.
And Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward and with eyes upturned. Something up there? And then it was as if thunder broke overhead. The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against the masonry and looked up.
There are more ways to fame than even Horace suspected. The road to immortality is not one but manifold. A man can but do what he can. As the poet writes and the painter fills with his inspiration the mute and void canvas, so doth the Cook his part. There was formerly apopular work in France entitled "Le Cuisinier Royal," by MM. Viard and Fouret, who describe themselves as "Hommes de Bouche."
Achille Viard, one of those unprincipled adventurers with which the stormy times had filled the metropolis, was employed, as a spy, to feign attachment to the Girondist party, and to seek the acquaintance, and insinuate himself into the confidence of Madame Roland.
It was the first time that a female voice had been heard in the midst of the clamor of these enraged combatants. The Assembly, unused to such a scene, were fascinated by her attractive eloquence. Viard, convicted of meanness, and treachery, and falsehood, dared not open his lips. Madame Roland was acquitted by acclamation.
Delhi might talk of a great flank march through Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes, and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon Vienna; the thing was to listen and wait for the other side to begin experimenting.
In other smaller apartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy against the Central European powers.
She paused for a moment, and then, fixing her eye calmly upon her interrogator, in those clear and liquid tones which left their vibration upon the ear long after her voice was hushed in death, answered, "Roland! a name of which I am proud, for it is that of a good and an honorable man." "Do you know Achille Viard?" the president inquired. "I have once, and but once, seen him."
"You, Monsieur; I thought it was old Monsieur Viard, he pursues me so." It was the same little maid I had seen in the hall, and that was why I trembled. She wept now for the scolding she had got. I caught my breath to inquire why she wept. "Oh, Madame, Madame it is the humor of Madame to humiliate me of late; she reminds me ever of my dependent position.
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