Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Capes — Read

On the very day following that of his arrival, the pendulum of Ned's particular destiny began its driving swing. He had taken good lodgings in a house in the Rue St Honoré, less, perhaps, as a concession to his rank than to his hypothetical prospects; and, issuing thence, after he had breakfasted, he had but a hundred yards to walk to reach a certain revolutionary centre that was become the goal to his long-drawn hopes and apprehensions.

It was a morning in early August, breathless and burning; and he turned into the gardens of the Palais Royal, that he might thus combine the opportunities to slake his thirst and to acquit himself of his commission to the royal proprietor of the adjoining palace. He had seated himself -- unaccountably loath, now the moment was arrived, to put his fears to the proof -- at a little café table under a tree, and was dreamily marvelling over the changed aspect of this _plaisance_ of sedition (how in three years the temper of its _habitués_ seemed to have altered, as it were, from that of a beleaguered to that of a triumphant garrison), when the familiar personality of one of three men who, talking together, strolled towards him, caught his immediate attention. Ugly, austere, with his Rowlandson paunch and unaffected neat clothes; with his wry jaw and crippled scuffle of speech -- Ned saw here the unmistakable presentment of his whilom friend, the king's painter. Between M. David and another -- a tall, plebeian-dressed man, with a flawed, supercilious face, the blotched darkness of which (something caricaturing that of the monarch's own) belied the mechanical amiability of its features -- walked an individual of a very benignant and serene expression of countenance, the nobility of which showed in agreeable contrast with the moodiness of its neighbours'. This man -- by many years the youngest of the three -- was of the middle height, with dark sleepy eyes and chestnut hair. His face, slightly marked by the small-pox, was of a rather sensuous, rather wistful expression -- at once pitiful and determined, with Love the modeller's finger-marks about the mouth and, between the brows, the little long scar cut by thought. He was dressed in a very shabby and slovenly fashion, with limp tattered wristbands, and the seams of his coat burst at the shoulders; and even the lapels of his vest were dog's-eared -- altogether a display of poverty a little ostentatious, thought Ned (who, nevertheless, had reason by-and-by to correct his judgment). Yet, for all his appearance, here was the man of the three to whom the others, it seemed, paid deference; for they hung upon his words, their eyes bent to the ground, while he walked between them, frankly expounding and with a free aspect.