Owing to the position of her chamber,
she saw nothing of the excesses to which Paris gave itself up during the
remainder of that day, and to which it returned with unabated zest on the
following morning. But the Carlats and her women learned from the guards
below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed
frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope. How could she prove
false to them? How doom them to perish, had there been no question of
her lover?
Of him she sat thinking by the hour together. She recalled with solemn
tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which
came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his
subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself.
She found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal--for the actor was
her lover--a thing done for her, which he would not have done for
himself, and which she quickly forgave him. The revulsion of feeling
which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from
him, no longer moved her much while all in his action that might have
seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct--in a crisis
demanding the highest--that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she
still clung to him.
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