![]() But they were sweet and noble and I was good then too. When I was young when I was an exile in England- it seemed like that to me when I earned my living by teaching good English girls what not to read in French. She slowly looked towards him, and replied: "When I was not La Grive. At last he said: "Yes, La Grive, that was-when-when?" Gustave Flavelle, with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, watched her. She paused her lustrous eyes fixed abstractedly on the sickly horizon before her. Years before I had laughed when he was folâtre, and cried when he was triste-in his books. For one political prisoner I had much regret-much. I hated them all, except the gendarmes and the prisoners. He thought me wise in counsel, he applauded me when his foolish officers were stricken in their vanity-by me. ![]() Ah, ah, that was amusing! Monsieur le Commandant was devoted-and jealous. I was a power the greatest in New Caledonia. Monsieur le Commandant-you think? Faugh! I had him, so, around my finger. La Grive, pale of lip and weary of eye, but striking, and pathetically handsome still, moved her fingers slowly over the waves of her tawny hair, and with a wistfully playful motion of the head, replied: "You wish to know, mon ami? Well, for one thing, because that was misery there for me too. He is only so grateful! He kisses his hand-there! to Junie Cavour, and says, Mon sauveur!" Why was La Grive so minded to suffer the perils of the ocean, this thirst, this hunger, the sweating sun of the hurricane season, the malarial moon that pinches the face and leaves it glassy and cold, and the trembling chance of reaching land across these thousand leagues of misery, with Gustave Flavelle, the outlaw of France? Eh, bien, that is a question which Gustave Flavelle cannot answer. Why am I free? Because Junie Cavour made one, two, three, many, guards, so blind!-and put out to sea with me on the night of the great banquet at the Hôtel du Gouverneur. Yesterday Paris said: 'Voilà! The pen of Gustave Flavelle it is good': Now with droll distress she cries, 'Gustave Flavelle-ah, most execrable!' Well, it is no matter. He continued: " Ma foi, what a mother France is! To-day she is the lover of those whom princes cherish to-morrow she cherishes those who hate princes. ![]() Junie Cavour sitting still and nerveless in the stern, only raised her head with a smiling languor, and waved her hand to her companion with an assent which was half protest, and said nothing. It was why on the motionless, tropic sea, with but a cupful of water left for her, and no food at all for either, bereft of sail and helpless of arm, he had heart enough to say in a cheery, if thirstily arid voice: "Ah, Junie, ma chérie, you shall see! There will be land or a ship to-morrow, or the next day, truly!" It was why the corner of the island set apart for political prisoners, behind an ominous escarpment of sea and bayonets, was less dreary for all than it otherwise would have been why Junie Cavour or La Grive the Cricket, as she was called, the sometime keeper of the secrets of Monsieur le Commandant, laughed in his face at an inspection one day, patted him on the shoulder and called him un beau garçon why, perhaps, as a sequence, she came again under the very noses of the guards-for did she not always bear the Commandant's permission to go where she listed?-and said to him gaily and meaningly that the cage of the starling was not built for the eagle. It was how he managed to make friends among the libérés and récidivistes, as among the officers and gendarmes. That was why his imprisonment in New Caledonia for political crimes, in company with his friend and compatriot Henri Rochefort, had been relieved of some of its deadly ennui and despair. GUSTAVE FLAVELLE had a strong sense of humour.
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