Hearts Beguiled by Penelope Williamson Read Free Book Online

thought of that, then she knew she had done the right thing after all.
    "Look, Maman!"
    The hoop was rolling smartly now, and Dominique ran beside it, laughing, his thin legs pumping hard. Then he accidentally nudged the hoop with his knee and it clattered to the hard-packed ground. He stared down at the fallen hoop, and his lower lip began to tremble.
    "Don't cry, Dominique," she called out to him. "Pick it up and try again."
    Agnes helped him to get the hoop rolling again and soon he was running, sending it spinning up and down the garden paths, and passersby paused to share in his laughter.
    A customer came to redeem an ivory jewel box pledged last month, and Gabrielle went with him into the coolness of the shop. Simon wasn't there, having slipped off to his favorite cafe that afternoon for a game of chess.
    After the customer left, Gabrielle sat down behind the desk and opened the book she had been reading. It was a fascinating political satire by an English author called Jonathan Swift, about a man named Gulliver who traveled to exotic lands.
    But today the story couldn't hold her attention. The face of Maxirailien de Saint-Just kept appearing on the pages; the printed words spoke to her in his soft, drawling voice. It had been two days since he had almost blown her across the river Seine with his crazy experiments with inflammable air, and she couldn't stop thinking about him.
    She had contemplated and discarded a hundred implausible excuses to seek him out again. But he would never be fooled and she absolutely couldn't, wouldn't make such a fool of herself. Still, this morning she had found herself dressing in her best gown—a violet muslin that matched her eyes, with a ladder of stiff rose bows on the bodice—and strolling by the Cafe" de Foy for no justifiable reason at all except that he might be coming or going at that precise moment, might see her, might pause to talk ... It made her breathless with excitement just to think of it.
    It's a simple infatuation, she thought, giving herself a mental shake. It was hardly to be wondered at—the man was handsome, worldly, and just different enough to be interesting. She had felt this way once before, about a dancing master her maman had hired during one flush summer when she was twelve.
    When she realized she was tracing the letters MAX with her fingernail in the margin of the book, she slammed the cover shut with a snort of self-disgust and pushed away from the desk. This time she didn't have the excuse of being twelve.
    Gabrielle began to wander aimlessly around the shop. The small lap escritoire that Simon had bought from the thieving vicomte de Saint-Romain was displayed on a table in back. Yesterday, while showing it to a potential customer, Gabrielle had found it to be filled with paper and a set of pens and charcoal sticks. She went to get it now, hoping for some other diversion to take her mind off that mad scientist.
    Gabrielle's mother had been a saloniere. Her elegant town-house on the Rue de Grenelle had been visited almost nightly by a coterie of the elite of the literary world. Novelists, poets, philosophes, or free-thinkers—some of the greatest minds of the day—had gathered at Madame Marie-Rose de Vauclair's to read their works aloud and discourse on life, religion, and politics.
    Even as a young child, Gabrielle had been a part of these soirees and sometimes, to amuse her maman's guests, she would take charcoal and paper and draw caricatures lampooning the famous personages at court. A favorite target was the haughty and frivolous queen, Marie Antoinette, whom the philosophes called "the Austrian bitch." Gabrielle would exaggerate the queen's features until her face resembled a greedy weasel's, and everyone would laugh.
    Now she resumed her seat behind Simon's desk, intending to draw the queen going masked and dressed as an angel to a theater where the players were all devils, but her fingers began to sketch a balloon instead. She made it quite