ONE:Paris seemed to be awaking into life again; the streets were more animated, the people to be seen in them were more numerous and did not all look either brutal or terror-stricken. Art, literature, and social gaiety began to revive.
TWO:Trzia became a power in Bordeaux. She appeared everywhere in public wearing those scanty Greek draperies so well calculated to display the perfection of her beauty; affecting the attitude of the Goddess of Liberty, with a pike in one hand and the other resting upon the shoulder of Tallien. [309] The populace cheered as she drove about Bordeaux in a magnificent carriage which, had it belonged to a royalist, would have excited their rage. She harangued the Convention with bombastic speeches about women and virtue and modesty, which, to persons not besotted with frantic republicanism, must appear singularly out of place; mingling her exhortations with flattery so fulsome and preposterous that she did not fail to command sympathetic acclamations, especially when she said that she was not twenty years old and that she was a mother but no longer a wife.The name, applied to Trzia, was a cruel injustice, and, with the ingratitude so often to be met with, now that she was less powerful and people were not in need of her protection, they forgot or neglected or slandered her, and that accursed name was frequently to be heard.
ONE:But while Trzia congratulated herself that she had happened to be at Bordeaux, the story got [301] about, and the fierce populace were infuriated at the escape of their intended prey. Their first revenge was directed towards the captain, through whose unguarded talk about a beautiful woman who looked like a grande dame, and had suddenly appeared and paid him the money, was the cause of the mischief. They made a furious attack upon him, several of them rushing at him to drag him to the guillotine. But if he was avaricious the English captain was brave and strong, so, drawing his sword with shouts and threats he wounded three or four, drove back the rest, regained his ship, and set sail for England.
TWO:Of course this spread consternation in the family of Noailles, usually so united that nothing of importance was ever done by them without a family council. And it was certainly irritating enough, that for no reason whatever except his own fancy he should desert his wife who adored him, who had one child and was about to have another, the management of his estates and all his duties in his own country, and exile himself for years to fight against a friendly nation and meddle in a quarrel with which neither he nor France had anything whatever to do. Besides, his example and influence had induced his brother-in-law, the Vicomte de Noailles, and his cousin, the Comte de Sgur, to adopt the same plans. All three young men declared they would go to America to fight for liberty.
