Page 1055 - les-miserables

tic and severe, little Marius stared at them with frightened
eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not women, but patri-
archs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.
With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled,
frequenters of this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the
Marquis de Sass****, private secretary to Madame de Berry,
the Vicomte de Val***, who published, under the pseud-
onyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince
de Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head
and a pretty and witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes
of scarlet velvet with gold torsades alarmed these shad-
ows, the Marquis de C*****d’E******, the man in all France
who best understood ‘proportioned politeness,’ the Comte
d’Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the
Chevalier de Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Lou-
vre, called the King’s cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and
rather aged than old, was wont to relate that in 1793, at the
age of sixteen, he had been put in the galleys as refractory
and chained with an octogenarian, the Bishop of Mirepoix,
also refractory, but as a priest, while he was so in the capaci-
ty of a soldier. This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at
night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of
the persons who had been guillotined during the day; they
bore away on their backs these dripping corpses, and their
red galley-slave blouses had a clot of blood at the back of the
neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at night. These
tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.’s salon, and by dint
of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some depu-
ties of the undiscoverable variety played their whist there;

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