THREE:Tallien had saved her life twice, and she had given him her youth and beauty and fortune; she probably thought they were quits. Her connection with him had lasted five years, and now her passion both for him and for the Revolution had burnt [343] itself out, she was in all the splendour of her beauty and not more than five-and-twenty years old. Most of her life lay before her.
THREE:The aide-de-camp returned, saying that he had executed the order, but adding
THREE:Her great uncle, the old Marchal de Mouchy, had never left the King on the terrible day of the 20th of June, but had stood by him making a rampart of his own body to protect him from the hordes of ruffians who were invading the palace; her father, on hearing of these events, had left his refuge in [230] Switzerland and hurried back to the King; so did her cousin, the Prince de Poix. Both of them had sympathised with the earlier Liberal ideas at first; but now, horrified at the fearful development of their principles, they bitterly regretted their folly and came to place their lives at the service of their King.But here, in this half-barbarous country, at an immense distance from everywhere she had ever been before, with a different church, a language incomprehensible to her and a sovereign mysterious, powerful, autocratic, whose reputation was sinister, and to whose private character were attached the darkest suspicions, an additional uneasiness was [124] added to her reflections owing entirely to her habitual careless absence of mind in not having provided herself with a proper toilette for the occasion.