Blanche was now alone, and there was no longer any necessity for constraint. There were no more curious witnesses to enjoy her sufferings and comment upon them. With a furious gesture she tore her bridal veil and wreath of orange flowers from her head, and trampled them under foot. “Extinguish the lights everywhere!” she cried to a servant passing by, stamping her foot angrily, and speaking as imperiously as if she had been in her father’s house, and not at Sairmeuse. The lacquey obeyed her, and then, with flashing eyes and dishevelled hair, she hastened to the little drawing-room at the end of the hall. Several servants stood round the marquis, who was lying back in his chair with a swollen, purple face, as if he had been stricken with apoplexy.
“All the blood in his body has flown to his head,” remarked the duke, with a shrug of his shoulders. His grace was furious. He scarcely knew whom he was most angry with--with Martial or the Marquis de Courtornieu. The former, by his public confession, had certainly imperilled, if not ruined, their political future. But, on the other hand, the Marquis de Courtornieu had cast on the Sairmeuses the odium of an act of treason revolting to any honourable heart. The duke was watching the clustering servants with a contracted brow when his daughter-in-law entered the room. She paused before him, and angrily exclaimed: “Why did you remain here while I was left alone to endure such humiliation. Ah! if I had been a man! All our guests have fled, monsieur--all of them!”
M. de Sairmeuse sprang up. “Ah, well! what if they have. Let them go to the devil!” Among all the invited ones who had just left his house, there was not one whom his grace really regretted--not one whom he regarded as an equal. In giving a marriage feast for his son, he had invited all the petty nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood. They had come--very well! They had fled--_bon voyage_! If the duke cared at all for their desertion, it was only because it presaged with terrible eloquence the disgrace that was to come. Still he tried to deceive himself. “They will come back again, madame,” said he; “you will see them return, humble and repentant! But where can Martial be?”