The situation in which Count Hannibal left Mademoiselle de Vrillac will be remembered.  She had prevailed over him; but in return he had bowed her to the earth, partly by subtle threats, and partly by sheer savagery.  He had left her weeping, with the words “Madame de Tavannes” ringing doom in her ears, and the dark phantom of his will pointing onward to an inevitable future.  Had she abandoned hope, it would have been natural.

But the girl was of a spirit not long nor easily cowed; and Tavannes had not left her half an hour before the reflection, that so far the honours of the day were hers, rose up to console her.  In spite of his power and her impotence, she had imposed her will upon his; she had established an influence over him, she had discovered a scruple which stayed him, and a limit beyond which he would not pass.  In the result she might escape; for the conditions which he had accepted with an ill grace might prove beyond his fulfilling.  She might escape!  True, many in her place would have feared a worse fate and harsher handling.  But there lay half the merit of her victory.  It had left her not only in a better position, but with a new confidence in her power over her adversary.  He would insist on the bargain struck between them; within its four corners she could look for no indulgence.  But if the conditions proved to be beyond his power, she believed that he would spare her:  with an ill grace, indeed, with such ferocity and coarse reviling as her woman’s pride might scarcely support.  But he would spare her.

And if the worst befell her?  She would still have the consolation of knowing that from the cataclysm which had overwhelmed her friends she had ransomed those most dear to her.  Owing to the position of her chamber, she saw nothing of the excesses to which Paris gave itself up during the remainder of that day, and to which it returned with unabated zest on the following morning.  But the Carlats and her women learned from the guards below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope.  How could she prove false to them?  How doom them to perish, had there been no question of her lover?

Of him she sat thinking by the hour together.  She recalled with solemn tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself.  She found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal—­for the actor was her lover—­a thing done for her, which he would not have done for himself, and which she quickly forgave him.  The revulsion of feeling which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from him, no longer moved her much while all in his action that might have seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct—­in a crisis demanding the highest—­that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she still clung to him.  Clung to him, not so much with the passion of the mature woman, as with the maiden and sentimental affection of one who has now no hope of possessing, and for whom love no longer spells life, but sacrifice.