Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/17

Rh —the hall of the "Athénée" became that of the Convention, the peaceful and placid audience were turned into angry men clamouring for vengeance, while the erudite, honey-mouthed Professor was thundering forth a public accusation, demanding the penalty of death, complaining that Carrier had only one life wherewith to pay for the fifteen thousand human lives he had cut short.

Then I saw Carrier, scowling down the accuser with his dark looks, I heard him calling upon his former colleagues in his loud, harsh voice:

"Why blame me to-day for carrying out your orders of yesterday? Accusing me, the Convention is accusing itself. My condemnation will be your condemnation, everyone of you; be sure of this, you will all be involved in the proscription that shall include me. If I am guilty, every man here is guilty,—every man and every thing, down to the President's bell."

Yet in spite of this, votes were taken; in spite of this, he was condemned. Terror drove men frantic now, as it had then, and the guillotine, after drinking the blood of the condemned was to drink that of judges and headsmen with the same indiflerence.

I had buried my face in my hands, as though shocked, atrocious murderer as the fellow was, to see him meet the death he had dealt out so recklessly to others.

Delanoue dropped his hand on my shoulder. "It is all over," he remarked.

"Ah!" I said, "so he is executed?"

"Who executed?"

"Why, that monster, Carrier."

"Yes, yes, yes," Delanoue assured me; "indeed it is thirty-four years ago now since he met with the little accident you refer to!"

"Ah!" I told him, "how glad I am you awoke me; I was having a nightmare."

"So you were asleep, eh?"

"I was dreaming at any rate."

"The deuce! I must not tell Monsieur de Villenave that. I am going to take you for a cup of tea to his house."

"Oh! you may tell him. I will repeat my dreams to him; he will not be offended."

Thereupon Delanoue, still doubtful about my temper on waking, drew me out of the public hall and into a waiting room, where Monsieur de Villenave was receiving his friends' congratulations. Arrived there, I was first of all presented to Monsieur de Villenave, then to Madame Mélanie Waldor, her daughter, finally to Monsieur Théodore de Villenave, his son.

Presently everybody set out on foot, by way of the Pont des Arts, in the direction of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. After half an hour's walk we reached our destination; whereupon we disappeared, one after the other, into the house in the Rue de Vaugirard I spoke of at the beginning of the chapter. I will now endeavour to give a description of its interior, having already sketched the outside. 



HE house possessed a character of its own, borrowed from that of its master.

We said the walls were grey, it would have been truer and more accurate to describe them as black.

You entered by a large door pierced in the wall, by the side of the concierge's lodge; inside you found yourself in a garden that was all hard earth without fiower-borders or flowers; there were summer-houses but no shade, vine trellises, but no grapes, trees but almost no leaves. If by any chance a blossom did blow in an odd corner, it was some wild flower that seemed almost ashamed to bloom amid city streets. It had surely mistaken this dark, damp enclosure for a desert place, deeming the habitations of mankind far away instead of close at hand. At any rate it found itself speedily culled by a charming, rosy-cheeked little girl with fair curly ringlets,—a cherub from the skies that had wandered unawares into this forlorn corner of earth.

From this garden, which might contain some forty or fifty square feet and ended in a broad strip of flags along the house front, you passed into a paved corridor. On this corridor, which led to a staircase at its extremity, four doors opened,—first on the left the dining-room, then to the right a small sitting-room. Beyond 