Marguerite remembered it all: what her brother must have
suffered in his manhood and his pride must have been appalling; what
she suffered through him and with him she never attempted even to
analyse.
Then the day of retribution came. St. Cyr and his kin had
found their masters, in those same plebeians whom they had despised.
Armand and Marguerite, both intellectual, thinking beings, adopted
with the enthusiasm of their years the Utopian doctrines of the
Revolution, while the Marquis de St. Cyr and his family fought inch by
inch for the retention of those privileges which had placed them
socially above their fellow-men. Marguerite, impulsive, thoughtless,
not calculating the purport of her words, still smarting under the
terrible insult her brother had suffered at the Marquis' hands,
happened to hear--amongst her own coterie--that the St. Cyrs were in
treasonable correspondence with Austria, hoping to obtain the
Emperor's support to quell the growing revolution in their own
country.
In those days one denunciation was sufficient: Marguerite's
few thoughtless words anent the Marquis de St.
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