Explore "Forget-me-not" by Marjorie Bowen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The governess, watching on the stairs or visiting with the children in the neighbourhood, saw many of the society figures who were received in the Faubourg St. Honoré: Victor Hugo, the renowned novelist, recently elected a member of the Chamber of Peers, General Cubières and President Teste who were presently to be involved in those appalling charges of corruption which would shake France, and she noted on several occasions a grim and sinister figure which impressed her unpleasantly, that of the old Due Pasquier, Chancellor of he Chamber of Peers, cold and cruel, bowed with age, nearly blind with cataract, but possessed of a formidable presence before which even Lucille Debelleyme quailed. He was believed to have no interest in life beyond the prestige of the peerage of France, his face was rigid with all the _hauteur_ of those ancient nobles who had mounted the bloody steps of the guillotine.
Mademoiselle Debelleyme hated the Due Pasquier and wondered why this aversion was like a presentiment of ill fortune. An aura of evil, she thought, surrounded the old man, with his eyes ringed by white circles, his thick grey whiskers, his shaking hands, his implacable strength.