She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old Invalide had done in the ’89—­a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the Cannebiere, who had loved one above her rank, a noble who deserted her for a woman of his own Order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like, scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter and the languid luster of sweet, contemptuous eyes.  The Marseillaise bore her wrong in silence—­she was a daughter of the south and of the populace, with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy mistral.  She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won, while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the people were made drunk at the bridal of their chatelaine in those hot, ruddy, luscious autumn days.

She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the scaffold.  Then she had her vengeance.  She stood and saw the ax fall down on the proud, snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent there, and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and smote the lips his lips had kissed,—­a cruel blow that blurred their beauty out,—­and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and drew it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and over the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting crowds of the multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to make their feast.  She stood and laughed by the side of the gray, angry water, watching the tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed weed.

That horrible story came to the memory of Cigarette now as it had been told her by the old soldier who, in his boyhood, had seen the entry of the Marseillais to Paris.  She knew what the woman of the people had felt when she had bruised and mocked and thrown out to the devouring waters that fair and fallen head.

“I could do it—­I could do it,” she thought, with the savage instinct of her many-sided nature dominant, leaving uppermost only its ferocity—­the same ferocity as had moved the southern woman to wreak her hatred on the senseless head of her rival.  The school in which the child-soldier had been reared had been one to foster all those barbaric impulses; to leave in their inborn, uncontrolled force all those native desires which the human shares with the animal nature.  There had been no more to teach her that these were criminal or forbidden than there is to teach the young tigress that it is cruel to tear the antelope for food.  What Cigarette was, that nature had made her; she was no more trained to self-control, or to the knowledge of good, than is the tiger’s cub as it wantons in its play under the great, broad tropic leaves.