of her presence
and the fragrance of her perfumes. Evariste recognised the _citoyenne_
Rochemaure. Thinking she had mistaken the door and meant her visit for
the _citoyen_ Brotteaux, her friend of other days, he was already
preparing to point her out the _ci-devant_ aristocrat's garret or
perhaps summon Brotteaux and so spare an elegant woman the task of
scrambling up a mill-ladder; but she made it clear at once that the
_citoyen_ Evariste Gamelin and no other was the person she had come to
see by announcing that she was happy to find him at home and was his
servant to command.

They were not entirely strangers to each other, having met more than
once in David's studio, in a box at the Assembly Hall, at the Jacobins,
at Venua's restaurant. On these occasions she had been struck by his
good looks and youth and interesting air.

Wearing a hat beribboned like a fairing and plumed like the head-piece
of a Representative on mission, the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure was wigged,
painted, patched and scented. But her complexion was young and fresh
behind all these disguises; these extravagant artificialities of fashion
only betokened a frantic haste to enjoy life and the feverishness of
these dreadful days when the morrow was so uncertain. Her corsage, with
wide facings and enormous basques and all ablaze with huge steel
buttons, was blood-red, and it was hard to tell, so aristocratic and so
revolutionary at one and the same time was her array, whether it was the
colours of the victims or of the headsman that she sported. A young
officer, a dragoon, accompanied her.

Dandling her long cane by its handle of mother-o'-pearl, a tall, fine
woman, of generous proportions and ample bosom, she made the circuit of
the studio, and putting up to her grey eyes her double quizzing-glasses
of gold, examined the painter's canvases with many smiles and
exclamations of delight, admiring the handsome artist and flattering him
in hopes of a return in kind.

"What," asked the _citoyenne_, "is that picture--it is so nobly
conceived, so touching--of a gentle, beautiful woman standing by a young
man lying sick?"

Gamelin told her it was meant to represent _Orestes tended by his sister
Electra_, and that, had he been able to finish it, it might perhaps have
been the least unsatisfactory of his works.

"The subject," he went on to say, "is taken from the _Orestes_ of
Euripides. I had read, in a translation of this tragedy made years ago,
a scene th