Although “crowned” as the favorite of a king who came in transparent incognito to Paris to visit her, though occupying princely quarters, outshining the fading La Mesard and the rising Julia Barucci in diamonds, Iza was still known as “the Clemenceau Statue.”

Her mother, as lost to shame, was the mistress of the wardrobe in this palace; she was spiteful as a witch, and began to resemble one in her prime, bloated, red with importance and self-indulgence, before the wrinkles came many and fast.  One day, annoyed at the persistency with which a friend of Clemenceau’s watched the queen of the disreputable in hopes to make her flagrancy a cause for legal annulment of the marriage, she denounced him as a traitor in an anonymous letter to the fretting husband, then in Rome.  Her daughter agreed to make good the assertion that the friend had failed monstrously in his trust.

Like Othello, Clemenceau swore that this demon of lasciviousness should betray no more men.  The force of depravity should no farther flow to corrupt the finest and best.  He entered the boudoir of the royal favorite and stabbed her to the heart.  In the morning, he gave himself up to the police.

The victim was so notorious that the Clemenceau trial was a nine days’ wonder.  His advocate was eloquent to a fault, but that inexplicable thing, the jury, found no extenuating circumstances in the act and brought in the verdict of murder.  The good men were incapable of appreciating the right he claimed to stop the blighting career of Messalina—­to divorce with steel where the state of the law, then meekly following the ecclesiastical ruling, forbade any sundering of the connubial tie except by death.

He met his doom calmly and laid his head beneath the axe with a martyr’s brow.  Kaiserina acknowledged this.

Felix Clemenceau understood everything now.  The trustees to whom he owed his subsistence-money, M. Rollinet the imperial counsel, and M. Constantin Ritz, a famous sculptor’s son, and the life-companion of Clemenceau, were characters in the momentous drama which Kaiserina recited, whom he knew by correspondence.

The finger of fate, which had urged the artist to commit a homicide for morality’s sake, had pointed out to his son the way which had to be followed over corpses of the young student’s slaying.

Brooding over the alteration in his future, he exchanged hardly a word with his cousin, during the prolonged journey, which they continued together, as though mutual reluctance to part bound them indissolubly.  Logic said there should be a powerful repugnance between those whom the shadow of the guillotine’s red arm clouded.  But, spite of all, Felix felt that Kaiserina was, like himself, well within the circle of infamy.  Her mother was the sister of the shameful Iza, and her husband’s careful guard of her proved that he doubted her walking virtuously if her unscrupulous mother stood by her side.  This old