Then suddenly that love, that devotion, which throughout his
courtship she had looked upon as the slavish fidelity of a dog, seemed
to vanish completely. Twenty-four hours after the simple little
ceremony at old St. Roch, she had told him the story of how,
inadvertently, she had spoken of certain matters connected with the
Marquis de St. Cyr before some men--her friends--who had used this
information against the unfortunate Marquis, and sent him and his
family to the guillotine.
She hated the Marquis. Years ago, Armand, her dear brother,
loved Angele de St. Cyr, but St. Just was a plebeian, and the Marquis
full of the pride and arrogant prejudices of his caste. One day
Armand, the respectful, timid lover, ventured on sending a small
poem--enthusiastic, ardent, passionate--to the idol of his dreams.
The next night he was waylaid just outside Paris by the valets of
Marquis de St. Cyr, and ignominiously thrashed--thrashed like a dog
within an inch of his life--because he had dared to raise his eyes to
the daughter of the aristocrat. The incident was one which, in those
days, some two years before the great Revolution, was of almost daily
occurrence in France; incidents of that type, in fact, led to bloody
reprisals, which a few years later sent most of those haughty heads to
the guillotine.
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