good turn' was a better
one!"
Jimmie yawned, and then laughed scornfully.
"Me!" he scoffed. "I didn't do nothing. I sent my sister to the
movies."
"SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE"
Marie Gessler, known as Marie Chaumontel, Jeanne d'Avrechy, the
Countess d'Aurillac, was German. Her father, who served through the
Franco-Prussian War, was a German spy. It was from her mother she
learned to speak French sufficiently well to satisfy even an
Academician and, among Parisians, to pass as one. Both her parents
were dead. Before they departed, knowing they could leave their
daughter nothing save their debts, they had had her trained as a nurse.
But when they were gone, Marie in the Berlin hospitals played politics,
intrigued, indiscriminately misused the appealing, violet eyes. There
was a scandal; several scandals. At the age of twenty-five she was
dismissed from the Municipal Hospital, and as now-save for the violet
eyes--she was without resources, as a compagnon de voyage with a German
doctor she travelled to Monte Carlo. There she abandoned the doctor
for Henri Ravignac, a captain in the French Aviation Corps, who, when
his leave ended, escorted her to Paris.
The duties of Captain Ravignac kept him in barracks near the aviation
field, but Marie he established in his apartments on the Boulevard
Haussmann. One day he brought from the barracks a roll of blue-prints,
and as he was locking them in a drawer, said: "The Germans would pay
through the nose for those!" The remark was indiscreet, but then Marie
had told him she was French, and any one would have believed her.
The next morning the same spirit of adventure that had exiled her from
the Berlin hospitals carried her with the blue-prints to the German
embassy. There, greatly shocked, they first wrote down her name and
address, and then, indignant at her proposition, ordered her out. But
the day following a strange young German who was not at all indignant,
but, on the contrary, quite charming, called upon Marie. For the
blue-prints he offered her a very large sum, and that same hour with
them and Marie departed for Berlin. Marie did not need the money. Nor
did the argument that she was serving her country greatly impress her.
It was rather that she loved intrigue. And so she became a spy.
Henri Ravignac, the man she had robbed of the blue-prints, was tried by
court-martial. The charge was treason, but Charles Ravignac, his
younger brother, prom
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