The windows were all open, their redundant hangings swaying a
little, and he heard once more, from the empty court, the small
plash of the fountain. From beyond this, and as from a great
distance--beyond the court, beyond the corps de logis forming the
front--came, as if excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris.
Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in
connexion with such matters as these--odd starts of the historic
sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but their
intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates,
the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the
omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of
revolution, the smell of the public temper--or perhaps simply the
smell of blood.
It was at present queer beyond words, "subtle," he would have
risked saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the
scene; but it was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air,
which had hung about all day without release. His hostess was
dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of
imagination we have just attributed to him that she should be in
simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were
not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn
something like it.
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