Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/263

Rh visits from her grandson. Finding herself alone and lonely, with failing health and depressed spirits, she thought of Madame de Talmont; and very wisely wrote offering a comfortable home to her and her daughter, if they would come and cheer her declining years.

The invitation was accepted with thankfulness; and the first faint gleams of comfort stole unconsciously into the darkened hearts of Madame de Talmont and Clémence as they sought to soothe the sorrows of another. Poor Madame de Salgues had soon a fresh grief to mourn over. Like all her family, she was a stanch Legitimist, and she had brought up her grandson in the same political creed; but he could not long withstand the influence of his new surroundings. Before he had been three months at the Ecole Polytechnique, his teachers and fellow-pupils had wrought a rapid conversion, and made him as fiery and unreasoning a partisan of Napoleon as he had once been of the Bourbons. Emile de Salgues was not a lad whose opinions upon any subject were likely to be of particular importance to the rest of the world, but to Madame de Salgues the apostasy of her grandson from the good cause was a very grievous affliction.

The invasion of France by the Allies, and the attack upon Paris, caused many apprehensions to the household of unprotected ladies; but, as they themselves would have expressed it, they were "quitte pour la peur," no adversary nor evil of any kind came near them. They all rejoiced at the overthrow of Napoleon, but with trembling, and that for more reasons than one,—they could not yet believe it was real, and they had not the slightest idea of what was to take his place.

On the day following the entry of the conquerors into Paris, Madame de Talmont said to her daughter, "Clémence, the Allies have sent their wounded here."

Clémence looked up from the embroidery upon which she was engaged. Two years of sorrow had changed the young girl into a