Page:The Mystery of Madeline Le Blanc (1900).djvu/23

Rh The ambition of the father's life was that the son should become important in the affairs of France; but assuredly not as a republican, whose hideous voices had been for some time filling the air with a miasma that choked the breath of royalty. After the storming of the Bastile in July, 1789, while the coils were twining around Louis XVI., Viscount Satiani and his family fled over the frontiers with the Count of Artois, the young brother of the King, and the Charles X. of a later age. Before young Satiani saw France again there had been a States General,a Republic, a King and Queen guillotined, a Reign of Terror, pillage and massacre, a Directory, and from the ashes and smoke of desolation had risen the figure of Napoleon.

The father having meanwhile died in poverty, and the mother having been conveyed to an alms hospital in Coblenz, where she still lay, young Satiani returned to France in 1800, under an assumed name. Under Napoleon's extension of amnesty to certain classes of nobles, he had detached himself from the Bourbon cause and assumed his real name, hoping to regain his father's possessions under