Жюльетта Бенцони - Marianne

'Liar! You dirty little liar! You have the nerve to tell me you don't know him, that you've never seen him? And what about this evening, on the stairs, didn't you see him then? Didn't you know him then, when all France knows his face almost as well as the Emperor's!'

Marianne struggled furiously to escape from the iron fist that held her.

'Let me go!' she muttered through her teeth. 'Let me go at once or I'll scream! You are mad or drunk, or both! Let me go, I tell you, or I'll scream!'

'Scream? Go on then if you want to! Try!'

Twisting her arm to force her to be still, he pulled her roughly to him and stopped her scream with a savage kiss. Marianne half fainted for a moment, but she recovered quickly. In order to escape his hateful kiss, she bit hard at the mouth crushed against hers. An instant later, she was free.

She saw, with a quick surge of triumph, her late attacker whip out a handkerchief and dab at his bleeding lips. He looked so foolish that she could almost have laughed in his face. But for the moment, it seemed to her that nothing mattered so much as getting rid of this horrid person. How could she ever have liked him, even for a moment? With his vigorous, outdoor frame crammed into that dark suit he looked like a peasant in his Sunday best. He was almost ridiculous. With a contemptuous toss of her head, she turned on her heel and again made for the door, intending to fling it wide, but he caught her half-way and picking her up as though she had been a parcel, he strode with her to the bed, flung her down and held her there, both hands gripping her arms, while he seated himself on the edge.

'Not so fast! You'll not escape so easily, my pretty one!'

Marianne saw to her surprise that his anger had quite gone. He was even laughing, careless of his lip which was already beginning to swell.

'I have told you to leave me alone,' she said calmly, but he seemed not to have heard. He was bending over her, studying her with the intensity of a collector presented with some rare item.

'How lovely you can be!' he said softly. 'It suits you to be angry. If you could see your eyes! They flash like emeralds in the light! I know you're worthless, a filthy little royalist spy, but it makes no difference – I can't help loving you—'

'Loving me?' Marianne said, flabbergasted by this unexpected declaration.

'Yes. It's true, you know, that I have not been able to forget you. You have haunted my days, and my nights – I kept seeing you, lying there in the straw, with your hair all about you, I could feel your soft skin under my hands – and now, I can think of nothing else except that you are here, that I have found you again! I have hungered for you, Marianne, and if you will forget all that lies between us, we will stay together always!'

It could not be true, he must be raving! He had stopped shouting at her, stopped hitting her. Quite suddenly, he had become all gentleness and tenderness. His hands were moving to caress her. He was bending down, slowly, inexorably, towards her lips, as though they held some fascination for him. In a flash, Marianne realized that he was on the point of subjecting her to a repetition of her unpleasant experience in the barn. At once, with an instinctive reaction of her whole body, she thrust him away with all her strength and screamed.

'No!—'

With a quick jerk, she was on her feet while Jean clutched at the bed to prevent himself falling. Smoothing out the disordered folds of her dress, Marianne folded her arms and stared defiantly at her attacker.

'Who do you take me for? You come in here, insult me, strike me and then on top of that, you think you only have to babble a few words of love and I'll fall into your arms! You love me? I am much obliged, and now, sir, do me the favour of leaving this room instantly! I have no wish to renew our – converse of the other night!'

By now, he too was on his feet, automatically brushing down his clothes with one hand. The expression of his face was heavy with chagrin.

'And once, there in Brittany, just for a moment, I could have thought you loved me—'

A rush of childish anger made her answer in words full of scorn.

'Me? Love you? You must be mad, I think! I needed you, that was all.'

The name he called her was too base not to betray the depths of his disappointment. With a look of hatred, he went to the door and opened it at last. But on the threshold he turned.

'You have rejected me, well, it will be the worse for you, Marianne! You shall be sorry!'

'I doubt it! Goodbye!'

She heard him go downstairs and, dropping into a chair, poured herself a few drops of wine to calm her. As her anger left her, she tried to think sensibly about the threat he had uttered but she finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing in it beyond the venom of a child that has failed to get its own way. He loved her, and therefore would do nothing to hurt her! In which she showed very little understanding of masculine vanity.

Marianne was still nursing these optimistic thoughts and wondering which novel it was where the heroine had been obliged to deal with a similar situation, when the door of her room was flung violently open from outside. Jean Le Dru burst in, followed by two gendarmes and pointed at the girl who sat there thunder-struck.

'There she is! She's an émigrée and has entered the country illegally. Her name is Marianne d'Asselnat and she is a royalist agent!'

Before Marianne could think of resistance, the two representatives of the law had seized her, each by one arm, and dragged her out of the room. Under the horrified gaze of the worthy Bobois and those, infinitely less agitated but still highly interested, of the other customers of the inn, she was hustled ignominiously down the stairs, thrust into a waiting cab and driven off.

She found herself inside a small black box with lowered blinds, beside a heavily moustached gendarme. Her first impulse was to scream aloud in a frenzy of rage and indignation, in the vain hope that someone would come to her rescue.

The gendarme tucked himself into his corner, and merely observed quietly: 'I shouldn't shout like that, if I were you, little lady. Or I'll have to gag you and truss you like a chicken! Be good now, it'll be best for everybody.'

Defeated, Marianne gave up the struggle and huddled as far as she could away from her guard. If ever she got her hands on that wretch Le Dru, she vowed, he would see what she was made of! To have her arrested like a common criminal! How could he—

Anger soon gave way to tears and then, because she was, after all, very tired and the swaying of the coach was soporific, Marianne fell asleep at last with the tears still wet on her pretty face.

Waking in the middle of the night to find herself in a cell of the prison of St Lazare, Marianne thought at first she must be dreaming. She had been snatched from her pretty little room so suddenly that, still half asleep, she could not help trying to shake off the nightmare but, little by little, it dawned on her that it was real.

The candle which had been left on a rickety table showed her a high, narrow room into which, during the day, the light must filter from a barred window set high up in the wall. The damp had made strange maps on the grey walls while broken flagstones and rusty locks revealed the antiquity of this one time convent. The only furniture, apart from the table and a stool, was a narrow bed on which was a straw mattress and a blanket. It was, as Marianne discovered by sitting on it, very hard. It was also extremely cold, since no fire was provided for the comfort of the prisoners. They had given her no time to snatch up her coat or carpet bag and, with nothing but her dress, Marianne could only hug herself in a desperate attempt to keep warm.

Her situation was a highly critical one. Nicolas Mallerousse had explained to her the perils awaiting the émigrées who returned to France illegally and, what was worse, the precious letter had been left behind in her bag. Marianne's feelings wavered between despair, when she thought of herself, and fury when she thought of the dastardly Le Dru who had denounced her because she refused to submit to his embraces. Finding this second state infinitely more stimulating than the first, she concentrated on it and even managed to extract a certain additional warmth from the anger that made her blood boil.

Dragging the blanket off the bed, she draped it round her shoulders and began striding furiously up and down the narrow space allotted to her, becoming increasingly wide awake as she grew warmer. She had to think, and think clearly, if she did not mean to moulder in this prison until it pleased Napoleon's police either to incarcerate her in some yet deeper dungeon, execute her or send her back to England under a strong guard. She was not altogether sure what happened to exiles who returned illegally since Nicolas had not seen fit to tell her, probably to avoid frightening her, but she guessed that it was bound to be unpleasant.

Nor did she know precisely where she was. The gendarme had told her on arrival that it was the prison of St Lazare but that meant nothing to her, the only prisons she was at all acquainted with being the Tower of London and the Plymouth hulks. However, since prisons were the department of the Minister of Police, the important thing was to see him as quickly as possible. She no longer had her letter, it was true, but she still had in her head the words which Nicolas had made her learn by heart and told her to repeat to him.