The person who had just appeared was a man of around thirty six years old, was dressed in a long blue riding coat decorated with a red ribbon, in the manner of the soldiers of the Empire set aside by the Restoration.
That man was tall, a blazing dark fire was in his look, illuminating his pale angry face with an unsettling gleam.
He took three steps towards Felipone, who recoiled in horror, while the man reached out his hand and cried.
“Murderer! Murderer!”
“Bastien!” Mumbled Felipone as he was seized by dizziness.
“Yes,” continued the Hussar, because that was him, “Bastien that you thought you had killed swiftly, and who is not dead…Bastien, that the Cossacks found lying in his own blood, an hour after your flight from your double crime, and whose life they saved…Bastien, prisoner of the Russians for four years and who, finally free, comes to ask you to account for the blood of his Colonel that covers your hands…”
And as Felipone, struck by lightning, recoiled in front of that terrible apparition, Bastien looked at the Countess and said “That man, madame, that wretch, he killed the child just as he killed the father.”
The Countess understood.
So the mother, formerly distraught and mad, became a tigress in the presence of her child’s killer. She lunged at him to tear him apart with her claws crying “Murderer! Murderer! The scaffold awaits you. I will bring you to the hangman myself!”
But then, as the villain retreated, the mother let out a cry and felt something stir deep inside her.
She let out a cry and stopped, pale, staggering, shattered…
The man that she was going to denounce to the wrath of the law, the man that she was going to drag up the stairs of the scaffold, that wretch, that villain, was the father of that other child that was wriggling inside her.
D. Cartier 