No! Monsieur de Crequy had neither eyes nor ears, nor thought for anything but his cousin, while she was by.
And she?
She hardly took notice of his devotion, so evident to every one else.

The proud creature! But perhaps that was her haughty way of concealing what she felt.

And so Madame de Crequy listened, and questioned, and learnt nothing decided, until one day she surprised Clement with the note in his hand, of which she remembered the stinging words so well, in which Virginie had said, in reply to a proposal Clement had sent her through her father, that 'When she married she married a man, not a petit-maitre.' "Clement was justly indignant at the insulting nature of the answer Virginie had sent to a proposal, respectful in its tone, and which was, after all, but the cool, hardened lava over a burning heart.

He acquiesced in his mother's desire, that he should not again present himself in his uncle's salons; but he did not forget Virginie, though he never mentioned her name.
"Madame de Crequy and her son were among the earliest proscrits, as they were of the strongest possible royalists, and aristocrats, as it was the custom of the horrid Sansculottes to term those who adhered to the habits of expression and action in which it was their pride to have been educated.

They had left Paris some weeks before they had arrived in England, and Clement's belief at the time of quitting the Hotel de Crequy had certainly been, that his uncle was not merely safe, but rather a popular man with the party in power.