I
myself felt a kind of thrill go through me, for her wild beauty
was almost tragical. Her madness was not grotesque, but solemn
and dramatic. There was something terribly deliberate in her
strangeness; it was full of awe to the beholder, more searching
and painfully pitiful than melancholy.
Coarse hands fell away from wanton waists; ribaldry hesitated;
hot faces drew apart; and all at once a girl with a crackling
laugh threw a tin cup of liquor into the fire. Even as she did it,
a wretched dwarf sprang into the circle without a word, and,
snatching the cup out of the flames, jumped back again into the
darkness, peering into it with a hollow laugh. As he did so a
soldier raised a heavy stick to throw at him; but the girl caught
him by the arms, and said, with a hoarse pathos, "My God, no,
Alphonse! It is my brother!"
Here Mathilde, still holding out the cross, said in a loud
whisper, "'Sh, 'sh! My children, go not to the palace, for there
is Francois Bigot, and he has a devil. But if you have no cottage,
I will give you a home. I know the way to it up in the hills.
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