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.