The Pale Assassin - Extract
Eugénie stood in the dim, stifling withdrawing room on the first floor of her guardian’s mansion-house. Her silk dress, limp with the heat, clung to her as she peered down through a crack in the shutters. Men with pitchforks were running along the lane below in the hot sunlight, their filthy faces streaming with sweat: workmen, or sans culottes, in long, dirty trousers. The sinister words of the ‘Ça Ira’, the revolutionary song, came hoarsely up to her.
‘Ah, ça ira! Les aristocrats à la lanterne!’
The street lanterns hung from iron supports that jutted out at right angles from the houses; they were used by the mob as convenient gibbets. Eugénie trembled as she listened. Why do they hate us so much? she thought. What have we done?
‘Will a new constitution change things?’ she said to Hortense, who was standing silently in the shadows behind her. ‘Will they stop threatening us then?’
‘People have long memories,’ said Hortense. ‘There’s a chasm between the aristocrats and the poor. It’s so deep it can only be resolved by something great and terrible.’
Hortense was not given to affection, but Eugénie felt her hand touch her back lightly. ‘Many aristocrats are emigrating, fleeing the country before it is too late. You and your brother should do the same, mademoiselle.’
The men, still singing raucously, had disappeared into the rue Saint-Honoré.
‘Armand will never leave,’ Eugénie said firmly. ‘He is not a coward.’ She turned from the shutters, but her voice wavered as she looked into Hortense’s intelligent, pitying eyes.
‘What would those men have done if I had gone out into the lane?’ She put her hands to her face. ‘Would they have hanged me? Yet I have done nothing. Have I, Hortense?’
