The country belonged as it ever did to the house
of Bourbon. The royalists were the lords of the soil as completely as
they were four years earlier, when Hoche obtained less a peace than an
armistice. The nobles made light of the revolutionists; for them
Bonaparte was another, but more fortunate, Marceau. So gaiety reigned.
The women had come to dance. A few only of the chiefs, who had fought
the Blues, knew the gravity of the situation; but they were well aware
that if they talked of the First Consul and his power to their
benighted companions, they could not make themselves understood. These
men stood apart and looked at the women with indifference. Madame du
Gua, who seemed to do the honors of the ball, endeavored to quiet the
impatience of the dancers by dispensing flatteries to each in turn.
The musicians were tuning their instruments and the dancing was about
to begin, when Madame du Gua noticed the gloom on de Montauran's face
and went hurriedly up to him.
"I hope it is not that vulgar scene you have just had with those
clodhoppers which depresses you?" she said.
She got no answer; the marquis, absorbed in thought, was listening in
fancy to the prophetic reasons which Marie had given him in the midst
of the same chiefs at La Vivetiere, urging him to abandon the struggle
of kings against peoples. But the young man's soul was too proud, too
lofty, too full perhaps of conviction, to abandon an enterprise he had
once begun, and he decided at this moment, to continue it boldly in
the face of all obstacles.
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