PART II

(One Year Later)

I

FAMINE

On the first day of September, 1793, Nicole left the Rue Maugout with the intention of visiting the Convention. Her step, that a year ago would have been confounded with the hum of life, now echoed down the quiet streets without interruption. Her eye, that once flashed so alertly through the curious crowd, passed with the indifference of habit down the deserted vista, and returned into the fixity of mental abstraction. The passers-by were rare; those who hung on the windows screened themselves. At a few doorways groups of emaciated children watched her progress, eyeing her basket with wolfish eyes. A year had brought but slight change in her. She still retained the bloom of youth, but her glance was more pensive. She was no longer gipsy or girl. A certain thoughtfulness had succeeded, elusive and arch, that told of the awakened imagination.

Twice on her way a band of police enveloping a prisoner passed, as passes a whirlwind over the stretches of the desert. Nicole gave them but a casual glance; such of the inhabitants as the familiar fall of feet brought to the windows retired indifferently, the prisoners themselves stoically adding their resignation to the monotony of the scene.

On the thoroughfares knots of Tapedures, the ruffians of the Terror, became frequent, stalking the town, beating the streets for their human game. Occasionally she met a bill-poster affixing the latest decree of the Republic--violent notes, in blue, violet, yellow, or red, that splashed the walls on every side. About the bakeries and butcher-shops knots of beggars were assembled, often reclining on the ground, watching with dreary, troubled glances those havens of food, ready to battle for a scrap of refuse.

A mother from a distant quarter, drifting from shop to shop, halted before such a group with a timid inquiry. From the loiterers, watching with confident indifference, a hag, extending her shriveled arm, shouted sarcastically:

"Welcome, citoyenne. You want something to eat? Take it; take it. We are so tired of eating meat in this section--nothing but beef and mutton and venison and pheasants here, morning and night. We get tired of that sort of thing in the end, you know. You were right to come here; see how well fed we are, how sleek! Don't believe him, his cellars are full of meat. It's rotting away. No one to eat it!"

From the fasting hags a rumble, rather than a laugh, went up. The woman who had covered perhaps half of Paris melted into a storm of sobs, beseeching a crust or a bone for the sake of her children. Then the hag, her raillery changing to anger, burst out:

"And we, have we no children? Are we not mothers, too? Hark to the woman: she thinks she's the only one to be pitied! Be off! Leave us in peace with your eternal wailings!"

At other times, women from the quarter itself, returning from a scouring of the markets, would awaken a sudden flame of interest.

"What luck?"

"What did you get?"

"Bread?"

"Meat?"

The scouts always denied success. Then a chorus arose:

"She's hiding it!"

"Show us your basket!"

"Eh, and under your dress!"

Once, in the Rue St. Honoré, a slip of a girl had almost freed herself of the questioning crowd, when a lean dog with a sharp nose bounded, sniffing, to her side. There was a quick turning in the crowd, and the nearest woman, leaping to her feet, shouted hysterically:

"I smell dried fish!"

The next moment, up the street a scuttling speck fled before a frenzied cloud from which shot out white arms and grasping hands.

Through such mad scenes of famine, Nicole arrived at the Hall of the Convention; where, being early, she entered the Tuileries to await the arrival of Barabant.

The gardens that once resounded with the hum of life, that once were gay with the swish of many colors, were now brown with the uninterrupted stretch of earth, rustling with the pervading sigh of leaves. Already in the trees, in the air, and in the tired soil was the melancholy of the parting season. Each breath that disturbed the branches, however slightly, set free a caravansary of fluttering leaves, and the leaves were sear.

She seated herself on a bench and abandoning the basket and clasping her knee, watched the whirling leaves heap themselves about her feet. One or two poised on her shoulder, in her hair, without her heeding them. Presently Goursac, also on his way to the Convention, joined her.

"This is the work of the cursed Montagne!" he said grimly, viewing the desolate gardens. "And yet Javogues is not satisfied. He would turn it into a cemetery!"

"Listen, my friend," she said earnestly. "If the Girondins fall, you will not stay to sacrifice your life to Javogues?"

"Do you think that I, a Girondin, would fly from that rascal!" he cried indignantly. "He works in the dark; he is incapable of striking in the open."

"And if the Girondins fall?" she persisted. But he refused to entertain the suggestion.

"This reminds me," he said, with a sweep of his arm, "of the time we were here a year ago. Do you remember?"

She nodded.

"Well," he said brusquely, "are you happy?"

"Yes."

"As happy as you thought?"

"No," she said slowly, "but it is my fault. The fault of my position, if you wish. I am jealous!"

"Of Louison?"

"No! Of what may happen."

"Why shouldn't he marry you?" he said angrily.

"Because I have not asked him," she answered wearily. "And because I would not have it."

"Why?"

"Because I love him, my friend," she said in rebuke. "And because a waif of the streets does not marry a man of education and position unless she wishes to drag him down."

Goursac, to her surprise, leaned over and patted her hand; then, as though ashamed to have shown such tenderness, he added gruffly:

"That is the only thing that can make you happy."

She did not deny it.

"I know what you have passed through."

She shook her head incredulously.

"It is but the history of womankind," he said laconically.

She took a leaf that had fallen on her hair and tore it slowly to shreds.

"Yes," he continued, warming to the subject, "you but resume in a year what woman has struggled for throughout the centuries. What is marriage but the instinct of self-preservation? Who imagined the bond? The weaker being, woman; and all the advances up the social scale have resulted from her silent striving toward equality with man. Without marriage you are a slave at the mercy of an angry word or a hostile mood; a slave who, in her search for security, must learn, without tears or show of fatigue, to render herself indispensable to the man."

Nicole rose abruptly, frowning, and with nervous fingers; but immediately she reseated herself with a forced laugh.

Presently, seeing that he had said more than he should have, he withdrew, leaving her immersed in the reverie his words had awakened.

Goursac had guessed truly. What womankind has endured, she had begun from the bottom. The instinct of self-preservation within her had awakened the immense intuitions that in the silent, enduring conflict of the sexes alike direct the wife, the mistress, and the outcast. She had studied Barabant, seeking the needs of his temperament, discovering his faults, and leading him to gradual dependence on her. Her imagination awoke. She saw the peril of mere domestic companionship. Where at first she had belittled the force of passionate love, she had come to realize its necessity and the need of constantly provoking his curiosity. She hid her thoughts from him, making of herself a mystery, employing that coquetry which, to the seeing eye, has at the bottom nothing but pathos. She had loved as a child. She had become an actress.

But in her heart of jealousy and doubt she knew well all her artifices could avail no longer than her youth. In marriage alone was peace and security. The daring of the thought frightened her. She knew it to be beyond her lot, nor in her devotion to Barabant would she have it so, but each day the dream returned, as from a pit one sees a star, or from a wreck the beacon on the forbidden shore.

Barabant found her lost in reverie, the leaves again unnoticed on her shoulders.

"The effect is pretty," he said, smiling down at her.

"On whom the leaves fall and rest, the earth will fall before the year is out," Nicole said. "That's the superstition."

"Nicole, I forbid you to say such things," he cried sharply. "They hurt me, and you know it!"

Satisfied with this evidence of his affection, she sprang up, brushing away the leaves, and saying with a smile:

"There, they have no power now."

"You are early."

"Yes; I was a little melancholy; I wanted to reflect. The gardens are delightful for that."

"I do not find them so."

"The mood is gone, now that you are here." She took his arm, smiling up into his face. They strolled through the alleys of chestnut and maple, Nicole drawing her skirt across her, placing her feet daintily, shaking her head in pretended anger as from time to time a leaf fluttered against her cheek.

"And the Girondins, mon ami? You have told me nothing of them."

"It grows worse and worse for them. The Jacobins are relentless."

"Don't identify yourself too much with them, then."

"But that is cowardice."

"No. If the Girondins fall, all the more will the Nation need the Moderates," Nicole answered anxiously, for her one dread was of his impulsive nature. "Why play into the hands of our enemies?"

Leaving the gardens, they entered the Place de la Revolution. The vast square that had swarmed with the multitude on the day of the execution of the king was devoid of movement, except where a few curious, wandering toward the emplacement of the absent guillotine, streaked like insects across the placid expanse.

Nearing the plaster statue of Liberty, Nicole was attracted by the lank figure of a man.

"Look over there," she said, drawing Barabant's attention. "Wouldn't you say that it was Dossonville?"

"There's a little resemblance."

"Much."

Barabant, who continued to study the figure, exclaimed:

"Really, the resemblance is striking!"

At this moment the man, turning, disclosed indeed the familiar features, while the well-known voice cried:

"Mordieu! It is Nicole and my little orator Barabant! Well, what's the matter? Touch hands!"

For Nicole, with a movement of superstition, had crossed herself, while Barabant, stock-still, remained staring stupidly at the apparition, until he was able to blurt out:

"What, it is you! Then you're not dead."

"Not even once!" he cried, slapping his hand emphatically across his chest. "I give you my word, it is not true! Come, feel of me. Is this the arm or the chest of a specter?"

"Still, I saw you," exclaimed Nicole, unable to reconcile the fact to her memory--"I saw you at the gate of the Abbaye--"

"My dear girl," Dossonville responded, with much good humor, "believe me, I am not dead; and, what's more, I never have been dead that I remember."

"But--"

"Mordieu, Nicole! are you determined to exterminate me?" Dossonville cried. "Let us reason. You saw me at the gate, but you didn't see me cut down, did you?"

"No."

"Then I reject your theory."

The three burst out laughing, until Dossonville suddenly exclaimed:

"But come, Louison must have told you."

"Louison!" echoed Barabant and Nicole, more and more amazed.

"Extraordinary woman! She can even keep a secret then!" Dossonville cried. "Why, it was Louison who found me in the crowd and piloted me to safety."

He recounted shortly the events of his escape, adding, as he extended his arm in a sweeping embrace of the horizon:

"And here I have lain concealed. I don't say where; the secret is too good. For ten months I lay like a rat. For the last two I have gone out only after midnight. To-day is the first trip into the blessed sun."

"Do you dare to risk it even now?" Barabant cried.

"Yes, now. Everything is arranged," he answered carelessly. "It was a little long coming, but it came."

But suddenly Nicole, remembering, exclaimed: "Barabant, you must warn him that Javogues is back."

"Back!" Dossonville repeated. "When did he leave?"

Barabant, in his turn, recounted the arrest and disappearance of the Marseillais, concluding:

"He reappeared with the rise of the Terrorists."

"Aïe, aïe!" Dossonville cried, having followed the recital with interest; "I cannot say that the situation is pleasant for the Citoyen Goursac."

A shadow passed over the brow of the young man, and he answered bitterly:

"I was a fool. We should have crushed the monster when we had him."

"There's good in him."

"What! You say it?"

"He wanted to cut my throat," Dossonville replied; "but that's nothing. He is sincere. It is true, from his point of view, there are not three men who should be alive in France to-day; but that is only a prejudice. I am keeping you; where are you bound?"

"To the Convention."

"Always a Girondin?"

"Well," Barabant answered doubtfully, "the Girondins had their chance, and they could not control the Convention."

"I say it's their own fault if they fall," Nicole interjected hastily.

"Nicole, you are right," Dossonville replied. "Moreover, they are about to lose their heads." He drew his finger across his neck. "In a political party, that's a grave failing."

"What, guillotine the Girondins!" Barabant exclaimed. "Guillotine Vergniaud, Brissot,--they would never dare!"

"Bah! you look upon it too seriously," Dossonville retorted. "What is the guillotine? Simply a vote of censure. But Louison--where can I find her?"

"At the Prêtre Pendu," Nicole answered. "You'll find her there about noon. That is, if there is no execution this afternoon."

"The Prêtre Pendu? Don't know it."

"It opened lately in the Rue Maugout, opposite No. 38."

"You call it--"

"The Prêtre Pendu."

"Charming!"

"I warn you, Javogues will be there."

"You are positive?"

"Absolutely."

"Good. Then I'll set out at once."

II

DOSSONVILLE EARNS A KISS

Dossonville, taking the river bank, proceeded with many inquiring halts, inhaling the air and sunshine in full breaths. He strolled into the halles, where the stalls, in state of siege, extended in long, deserted barracks; no buying, no selling, no provisions, only in the shadows the same clusters of limp basking beggars, slumbering with one ear alert.

As he languidly pursued his way, a door at his side was flung violently open and a man bearing on his back an enormous side of beef scurried across the place toward a butcher-shop, the door of which swung open to receive him. Instantly, with a hue and cry from every corner, there was a swift leaping of famished men, women, and children. Before Dossonville could leap aside he was caught in the rush, elbowed, buffeted, and thrown off his feet. When again he rose, the butcher was buried under a mound of ravenous humanity, thirty feet from his destination, while the square was obscured with the multitude that battled over the shreds of meat which came up from the bottom of the heap.

Hardly had he extricated himself from the tangle when, in the Place de la Bastille, a group of savage boys, pursuing a dog with a bone, swept by him, snatching at the fleeing animal, unmindful of its anger. One hand at last, more fortunate than the others, closed over the brute, and the human children tore the bone from the beast. Pursuing now a haggard boy, they returned in a cloud, panting, with famine-inflamed eyes, while the lean, infuriated brute at their heels struck with angry jaws into the pack.

Beset on every side by troops of children too weak to extend their hands, Dossonville arrived at the Rue Maugout, readily recognizing the Cabaret of the Prêtre Pendu by its figure of a priest, which, swinging from a miniature gibbet, advertised the republican principles of the host.

Seeing no one before the entrance of No. 38, he penetrated into the inner room of the cabaret, where, the two or three groups occupied with cards being unknown to him, he exchanged salutations with the hostess, asking genially:

"Your husband, citoyenne, I hope, is frying me a bit of steak?"

"My man's with the army."

"A patriot, then."

"And there's no meat."

"An omelet will do."

"No eggs, no fish, no vegetables."

"Diable! that leaves nothing but bread and cheese."

"No bread, no cheese!"

"Mordieu, what am I going to lunch on?"

"Soup."

"Ah!" Dossonville nodded, with understanding. "True! As long as the material world exists, soup is possible. Well, soup be it, citoyenne, soon and hot."

He passed curiously to the card-players, for his ear had caught such strange expressions as these:

"I play the Liberty of Marriage."

"I the Genius of Peace."

"The Equality of Rank."

"Liberty of the Press."

"Taken by the Genius of Arts."

Dossonville, much perplexed, moved to a survey of the pack. He found the Monarchs indeed dethroned; the Kings succeeded by the Geniuses of War, Commerce, Peace, and the Arts; the Queens replaced by the Liberties of Faith, Professions, Marriage, and the Press. The Knaves themselves, as though suspected of royalistic tendencies, had yielded to the Equalities of Duties, Color, Rights, and Rank.

"The sentiment is perfect," he murmured to himself, "perfect, but perplexing."

The hostess appearing with a capacious bowl, he returned to his corner, where he contemplated the soup with that respect and curiosity which a Parisian gives to a dish of which he has not had the making. He stirred it doubtfully, and at the first taste drew a long face.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! They've put the aristocrats in the soup," he grumbled. "However, being good patriots, we must eat it."

He was bending over the bowl, when a shadow darkened the open doorway, and with the fragrant scent of flowers came the voice of Louison, chanting:

"Cockades, patriots; cockades, my Sans-Culottes. The last ones I have been able to save for you."

She passed among them, calling to them by name, tapping them on the shoulders, but receiving nothing but banter.

"Are they good to eat--your cockades?"

"As a salad, nothing is better." Taking up the idea, she repeated laughingly: "Buy my salads, citoyens; buy my patriotic salads!"

Wishing to enjoy her surprise, Dossonville kept silent, leaning forward, his chin in his palm, smiling expectantly. Thus Louison discovered him. The very slightest look of astonishment passed over her face, a fugitive amazement that she immediately controlled.

"Louison, you are discretion itself," Dossonville said approvingly, his smile extending to a grin as he stretched forth his hand. "If ever the Revolution places women in power (and what is impossible to-day?), I'll recommend you for Minister of Foreign Affairs."

"Citoyen, citoyen, you are mad to enter this place," Louison cried. "Do you not know that this is the headquarters of Javogues?"

"I know it; but see you, Louison, that animal is so stupid."

Divining that despite his careless manner he was fortified against the encounter, she relaxed and said more calmly:

"Really, I didn't expect that you'd escape."

"My dear Louison, it is not so difficult."

"In these days it is."

"A man has as many lives as a cat," he said ironically. "It is the imagination that is lacking."

As though to put this theory to the test, a voice jarred upon the stillness, crying:

"Where is the spy?"

The next instant the cabaret was thrown into turmoil as Javogues, at the head of three or four companions, rushed in.

"Good day, citoyen," Dossonville's cool voice was heard saying above the uproar, "and how goes it with you since we parted last?"

Guided by his voice, Javogues precipitated himself toward his enemy, but as his hand shot forth it stopped in mid-air, and he fell back in astonishment.

Dossonville, never losing his poise, with an imperceptible movement of his hand had rolled back the lapel of his redingote, disclosing on his breast the shield of an agent de sûreté.

"Impossible!" Javogues exclaimed, recoiling. "You an agent de sûreté! It's a counterfeit!"

Dossonville checked the second rush as coolly as the first. His hand went into his breast pocket and withdrew a document, which he tendered to Javogues on the tips of his fingers, saying:

"Read, and grow wise."

The Marseillais passed it to a companion, who shook his head and passed it to a third, who read in a piping voice:

OFFICE OF THE COMMITTEE OF SAFETY

The Citoyen Santerre having appeared before us and established the alibi of the Citoyen Dossonville on the day of the Tenth of August, we declare the Citoyen Dossonville innocent of all suspicion. Furthermore, as it appears he refused to disclose the nature of the secret mission, in the interests of the Nation, on which he was engaged, even at the risk of his life, we declare the Citoyen Dossonville a patriot who deserves the gratitude of his country.

We further appoint the said Citoyen Dossonville agent de sûreté, with the following powers--

"The rest is quite technical," Dossonville interrupted. He turned to Javogues, who, thus robbed of his dearest vengeance, remained transfixed with stupor. "You see, Citoyen Javogues, you cannot always tell a traitor by the look in his eyes."

Stung by the taunt, Javogues advanced furiously:

"It's a lie," he cried. "It's another of his tricks. The paper is a forgery." Then turning to his companions, he shouted: "Don't let him out of your sight until I return!"

Dossonville, erect and solemn, checked him sternly:

"Enough! Enough, citoyen, do you hear? What you have done I forgive--but go no further! An act such as you contemplate is a defiance of the Nation. I represent the Nation. Citoyen Javogues, I warn you, at the next attack you make against me I'll have you on the scaffold within twenty-four hours."

Javogues, impressed despite himself, found no encouragement in the faces of his comrades. He turned on his heel and went dejectedly toward the door. There he wheeled, and shaking his fist, cried:

"Dossonville, if I am not to hate you, arrest me, guillotine me at once. For, as long as I live, it is war between you and me! If you want me, you'll find me here, at five."

Dossonville remained a moment pensive and erect.

"Mordieu!" he exclaimed at last, "the fellow is genuine. Devil take me if I can help liking him." Then turning to Louison, who had followed him with fascinated eyes, he said: "As for you, ma belle, I owe you everything. To begin with, I swear an eternal love."

And, taking her in his arms, he kissed her on the cheek, and then sat down.

In a moment the room was swept of its terrified guests, while the proprietress, disappearing through a back door, left the memory of a red stocking.

Louison, at the familiarity, recoiled, while anger like a blast from an oven inflamed her face. Her hand stole to her bosom, and with a sudden movement she hid a knife behind her. Dossonville, feigning ignorance, appeared engrossed in the selection of a cockade from the abandoned basket. But as the girl in her passion leaped at him, he sprang aside, whipped out his sword, and flung himself behind a table.

Then, those without, flattening their noses against the window or peering through the doorway, beheld a furious combat between them; the man, always cool and alert, checking the rushes of the girl with the point of his sword, turning, retreating, or advancing as his assailant, with the rapidity of a bird, flew from point to point, darting, feinting, or striking for an opening. Meanwhile above the scuffle and the patter of feet the voice of Dossonville rose imperturbably in running comment:

"Hoop-là, parried! A little more to the left and you had me. Mordieu, who'd have thought a pretty woman would resent a kiss? Such a fraternal kiss, too, so full of gratitude! Perhaps that's the trouble; you never can tell with a woman. What now?"

Bounding on the table, the girl without a pause leaped full at him.

"Bravo! That's a jump for you. What a woman! Louison, you are splendid. Dame, what fury! À toi!"

Hard pressed with the recklessness of her attacks, he threatened her throat so closely that, with the slightest stiffening of his arm, he would have run her through.

"A life for a life! there's gratitude for you!"

From outside they cried to him offers of help.

"Never; any man that interferes, I'll shoot down. This little affair is between us,--eh, Louison? What now?"

He sprang away, barely avoiding a chair hurled to break down his guard.

"That was well imagined. Mille diables, what a woman--and not a sound! Louison, I adore you already. Louison, my dear, do you believe in another life? If you would only guarantee me another, I'd give you this out of courtesy,--only then I couldn't adore you. What energy! If you are getting tired, Louison, rest a while."

But her answer was to fling herself again at him, seeking to come inside his guard by stooping suddenly to one side, grasping at his blade with her free hand. Dossonville, forced to meet the fury of the onslaught, a second time presented the point of his blade to her throat; but this time, so impetuous was her rush that only the instant withdrawal of the weapon saved her.

"A second time, Louison, I spare you. My gratitude, you see, is eternal. Louison, you fight too recklessly, you expose yourself. You rely too much on my sense of gratitude. Hoop-là! Again I had you! If it's only a matter of a kiss that stands between us, you might give it back to me. Ha, ha! Well struck, Louison! Where will it end? My gratitude restrains me, and you must realize what a good fellow you are trying to end--"

Suddenly, to the astonishment of all, Dossonville included, Louison halted, panting and heaving, restored the knife to her bosom, and burst out laughing.

"Dossonville," she cried, flinging out her hand in acclamation, "you're a man!"

He dropped on both knees, exclaiming: "That word disarms me. Do me the favor of cutting my neck."

With a movement as swift as her attack, the girl passed to his side, and, bending suddenly, kissed him on the forehead.

"That one, Dossonville," she cried, "you have deserved."

And with a laugh, she flitted into the street, where the spectators, respecting her sudden whims, prudently left her an open passage.

III

WAITING FOR BREAD

In this season of famine, when the supply of bread barely sufficed to feed one half of the population, by six o'clock in the evening long lines began to form in front of the bakeries, to await through the long night the morning distribution of loaves. Javogues, who took the occasion of this assembling to study the crowd for signs of traitors or faint-hearted republicans, returned each evening, toward five o'clock, to the Prêtre Pendu in a gale of patriotic ferocity.

But this afternoon, to the astonishment of those who were accustomed to quail before his glance, his lagging step, his knotted club trailing at his heels, and his head relaxed on his shoulders gave every appearance of dejection. At the Prêtre Pendu he sank gratefully into a chair, covered the table with his arms, and plunged moodily into his thoughts.

Presently, arm in arm, bristling with weapons, in villainous shoes wound about with strips of rags, appeared three Tapedures,--Cramoisin the mountebank, Boudgoust the waiter, and Jambony the crier,--thrown together by the strange tides of the Terror. In the middle, Boudgoust strode with hang-dog head, as though his height had overshot his strength. The shriveled, furtive mountebank clung to one arm, while at the other waddled the bloated, leering cub of the gutters. So tightly huddled were they that they seemed one unclean body with three heads--an incongruous union of malignant age, stultified manhood, and vicious, insolent youth.

Perceiving Javogues silent and absorbed, they slackened their pace, and Boudgoust said cautiously:

"Cramoisin, he's still in bad humor."

"It's that cursed Dossonville, my little Boudgoust. If it worries him, why doesn't he get rid of him?"

"Javogues's the devil when aroused," Boudgoust continued apprehensively. He turned to the boy: "Jambony, throttle that voice of a carriage-crier and speak softly. It might be best to slip away."

But Javogues, lifting his head, beckoned them.

"Well, watch-dogs, what luck?"

Cramoisin and Jambony looked to Boudgoust, who turned his pockets inside out, showed the flat of his palms, and answered:

"Nothing."

"An unfortunate day--for all of us," Javogues said gloomily, and relapsed into bitter reflections on his encounter with Dossonville.

"What luck!" exclaimed Cramoisin. "We escaped easily. Suppose we eat something."

Jambony opened his mouth, and the voice, trained to rise above the jargon of the street, resounded from one end of the street to the other.

"Food!"

The invariable bowl of soup and a bottle of thin wine were placed in front of each. Boudgoust, whose appetite was in proportion to his length, accomplished his portion in one swallow, and being thus reduced to philosophizing, exclaimed:

"All citoyens should be made to eat together."

"Nothing new there," Cramoisin interjected querulously. "We have the Fraternal dinners, haven't we?"

"That amounts to nothing," Boudgoust retorted. He leaned his elbows on the table, scratching the back of his hands as he talked: "But every day, every meal. That's democracy! Or, better, no citoyen to eat more than another! If I saw any one eating meat to-night I'd arrest him. All citoyens should share alike."

Jambony, having now emptied his bowl, declared in his stentor's voice:

"And I am for equality of dress. No distinction between citoyens on account of dress! A national costume--one for the men and one for the women!"

Presently, while he launched into the details of his scheme, a raven, with a croak and a flap of its wings, hopped from the gloom of the opposite entrance, followed by the diminutive figure of la Mère Corniche, who, giving a nod of understanding to the four, installed herself on a stool and began to knit.

"There's one who's no Girondin," Boudgoust grunted.

"She's a tiger since the death of Marat," Jambony remarked in a thundering whisper. "She was very devoted. They say--"

And he proceeded to detail one of those fantastic tales which the Parisian playfully attributed to any woman, were she eighty or eighteen.

Cramoisin, having caressed the last drop in his bowl, now exclaimed:

"Jambony, you are tiresome, you and your national costume. You go half-way. What we must restore is the primeval innocence!" As he spoke he pressed a flat thumb on the table, while from under his eyebrows shot the shrewd dagger glances of the madman. "The primeval innocence--there only is the truth! Nothing but that can restore republican simplicity. No clothes at all! A return to the simplicity of Adam and Eve--the true, the real republicans! There's something that would be sublime!"

"Allons, Cramoisin, you have too much vanity!" Boudgoust replied.

"Yes, he wants to display his beauty," put in Jambony, who retained the spirit of raillery gathered at the doors of the theater. "We know that trick, old fellow."

Cramoisin was beginning a furious answer when Javogues, turning impatiently, demanded the hour.

"Close to seven."

"They come later every night," Javogues grumbled. He rang the table with his fist. "Perhaps they think they can hide their guilty faces in the dusk!"

Presently, from the entrances, people with baskets began to appear, directing their way toward the Bakery Gobin, a rod below, to take up the vigil that consumed the night.

Those who passed the Prêtre Pendu waited anxiously their welcome from the mouth of Javogues, whose salutations varied according to his estimate of their patriotism.

"Greetings, patriots."

"Greetings, citoyens."

"Greetings."

To some he simply nodded in return. Occasionally he stiffened and, without recognition, fastened his scrutiny on the eyes of a new arrival, as though to tear away the mask and wrench forth the secret.

Marching purposely toward them, looking Javogues disdainfully in countenance, came Goursac. So implacable were the glances the two enemies exchanged that they seemed to clash midway in the air. Arrived within ten feet of the group, Goursac turned curtly on his heel and departed toward the bakery without having recognized them by word or nod. The Tapedures cursed; Javogues, following him with his glance, muttered:

"Sacré! Girondin, wait a little longer!"

Several women passed, among them Nicole, who received a friendly greeting from Javogues, Boudgoust commenting:

"Fine woman that, Cramoisin, for all you say!"

Cramoisin scowled for an answer, following the girl with a glance of implacable hatred.

"Eh, yes," Jambony added, sinking his voice. "As for me, if it weren't for Javogues I'd not keep her long chained up to that cursed Barabant."

"Barabant," growled Boudgoust, "is an indulgent. He is forever talking of mercy."

"He who speaks of mercy in these days," cried Cramoisin, purposely raising his voice, "is in league with aristocrats. He should be denounced."

Javogues turned angrily:

"Enough! Barabant is a patriot. I know it!"

Boudgoust, who disliked quarrels, interrupted:

"Hello, who's this brat?"

A girl of six or seven was approaching, carrying in her arms a stool.

Javogues, at once suspicious, stopped her.

"Who sent you out, my little one?"

"Papa."

"And who is your father?"

"The wig-maker there," she said, showing the shop with her small finger. "He's coming to take my place later."

"Ah, your papa is a good Royalist."

The child, frightened by his looks, remained twisting from side to side, while Javogues, softening his voice, repeated the question.

The child shook her head.

"What does he say of us?" It was Boudgoust who put the question.

"Don't know."

"But he suffers much with this famine, doesn't he?" suggested Cramoisin, slyly.

"Oh, yes," she answered, the innocent face brightening. "Papa says we suffer more now than before."

Cramoisin, triumphant and smiling, drew back; the child toddled on.

"Ah, Citoyen Flaquet," Javogues cried in triumph, "who doesn't dare pass us in the daylight and who regrets the royalty, we hold you at last!"

Among the next to leave No. 38 was a girl of sixteen, who, in greeting Javogues, faltered a little in her walk. It was Geneviève, suddenly blossomed into a woman. Her eyes, that formerly were too black and large on her sallow face, were now in fair relief to her cheeks, that had flushed with the glow of womanhood. She moved lightly, and even the carelessness of her dress could not conceal the full figure, erect and flexible. The four men watched her pass on and take her place in the lengthening line.

"The best of the lot!" Cramoisin said.

"She was ugly enough last year," Boudgoust replied.

"She was not a woman then," retorted the other, who seized the opportunity to broach his favorite theory. "Women, they're good enough in their places. They're put here to give men to the world. I believe in the community of women. No marriage. Women discriminate according to a man's being old or ugly or poor. All discrimination is unrepublican. There should be no distinctions."

"Yes, my old fellow, but halt there," Jambony said impudently. "No community of men."

"Why not?"

"You'd fall to the lot of la Mère Corniche."

Cramoisin angrily resented the interruption. He passed to the sociological aspect of the reform, and declared that with the Nation battling against all Europe such a measure was needed to fill in the gaps of war. Other bottles were brought and torches.

Below at the bakery, two torches disclosed the undulations of the monstrous queue, but the faces and the outlines of the figures were confounded in the night. Sometimes a brief song would mount up, a few whispered communications could be heard, and the steady snoring of a sleeper.

From there, in the narrow circle of light under the figure of the priest, which swung in grotesque outlines, the four Tapedures could be seen, drinking and discussing. At times their voices, impassioned and drunken, reached the line, the high pitch of Cramoisin crying: "Primeval innocence! community of women!" or the bellow of Javogues, "There is no God!" as the four, without listening to one another, debated furiously their sublime ideas.

From time to time others arrived through the darkness, relieving those in line. Toward midnight Barabant replaced Nicole. Several of the new arrivals were fresh from cabarets; many of those whom no one relieved began in drunken boisterousness to scream upon the night ribald songs and jests, foul anathemas of the party in disfavor.

The noise of kisses and tipsy laughter became frequent. The women and children, accustomed to the scene, retired under shawls and sought to efface themselves against the chilly walls. Some women, more vicious than their mates, joined in the drunken carnival, which toward three o'clock, when the torches dropped back into the night, knew no bounds. And all the while, amid this licentiousness, muffled or in brazen outcry, the line asleep or cringing, whispering or ribald, waited stolidly for the dawn.

Shortly after three, Javogues and his body-guard quitted the cabaret to make the rounds. A single torch held aloft by Boudgoust lit up the huddled queue. They passed down the line, Jambony and Cramoisin embracing the women, Javogues compelling all to cry "Vive la Nation!" and "A bas les Indulgents!" As luck would have it, Cramoisin perceived the face of Geneviève, which, in her curiosity, she momentarily displayed.

The drunkard flung himself forward and seized her in his arms. She defended herself furiously, averting her face, resisting all his efforts to drag her into the street; until Cramoisin, getting his arm around her waist, wrenched her forth screaming in her terror:

"Citoyen Javogues, Citoyen Javogues, protect me! Don't let him take me, Citoyen Javogues!"

Javogues, recognizing the voice, ran up.

"Who've you got there?"

"Don't you see I've got a woman?" Cramoisin said surlily. He added an obscenity that caused the girl, in despair, to exclaim:

"Oh, Citoyen Javogues, save me, save me!"

"None of that," Javogues cried angrily. "Let her go."

As the drunken Cramoisin started to protest, with a blow of his fist he knocked him down. Geneviève, carried down in the fall, flung herself at the feet of Javogues, grasping his knees.

"Thanks, thanks," she cried hysterically. "Citoyen, you are good, you are kind!"

Then fearing to become too prominent, she hurried to her place, enveloping her head with a shawl and crouching back into the friendly obscurity.

Cramoisin, whimpering, disappeared; Javogues, Boudgoust, and Jambony reeled away. Fatigue stilled even the noisiest. The night was achieved in sleep.

Toward six the line roused itself, as two inspectors of the municipality arrived to preside over the distribution of the bread. The doors were opened and the frantic rush began, those in the rear crowding forward with frenzied inquiries, which changed into the familiar shrieks of despair when the doors were closed with a third of the line unserved.

Geneviève, who had received her maximum of bread among the last, avoided the outstretched hands of the unsuccessful and escaped up the street, to where la Mère Corniche, at her post, exacted a tithe from each lodger. Dropping her tribute in the basket, she was hastening on when the concierge retained her with the cry:

"The Citoyen Javogues wants you."

Thinking that it was to fetch water from the Seine, the girl sought her bucket and hastened to the room of the Marseillais. At the sight of the bucket, Javogues frowned and asked:

"What are you doing with that?"

"Don't you want me to fetch water?"

"No."

"Ah."

"Leave the bucket in the corner."

Geneviève obeyed. Javogues shut the door, returned, and frowned again as he saw that she was trembling.

"What is the matter?" he said roughly. "Why do you tremble?"

She shook her head.

"Are you afraid of me?" he said, advancing.

"Oh, no."

"Then what is it?"

"I'm glad--that's all."

"True?"

All at once the girl, flinging herself at his feet, caught his hands and cried:

"I love you, I love you, I love you!"

"What, me!" Javogues cried, amazed, retreating a step. "You love _me_!"

"I adore you. I think of nothing but you. You are my god!"

"There is no God!"

"Yes, when one loves."

"Then you love me--it's true?" he said, raising her to her feet. "Why do you love me?"

"Why?" She drew a long breath. "You are so big, so heroic!"

Javogues fell back into a chair, repeating:

"Extraordinary! I don't understand."

She threw herself into his arms with the movement of a child, and, without seeking to conceal her thoughts, repeated a hundred caresses while he continued to mumble stupidly:

"Extraordinary! Extraordinary!"

Finally her emotion penetrated him. He took her in his hands and held her from him, she coloring with pleasure at this show of force, which came to her as a caress.

Suddenly a tremor ran through his immense body, an upheaval out of which came something gentle and softened. He continued to hold her before him, without shifting the glance that plunged into her eyes, while the girl, turning in his grasp, repeated, "Let me go!" for, child that she was, she divined what was passing in him.

"But why," he repeated stupidly--"why do you love me? I don't understand. No other woman ever has."

"Because you are so heroic. All the others understand nothing of poverty and sorrow. You--you understand. You give hope to such as I. When I hear you speak those sublime thoughts, my heart swells. You too have suffered; you know the abyss." She added, not without elation: "I loved you from the first day. I never thought you'd notice me."

"It's true--really true, then--what you say to me?"

For all answer she looked at him and smiled.

"It's curious. I don't understand it," he said at last. "But I believe I'm beginning to love you."

Then, without quite knowing why, she lowered her eyes.

IV

SIMON LAJOIE

The inhabitants of the Rue Maugout, astounded by the sight of Geneviève arm in arm with the overshadowing Javogues, had not recovered from the shock of this evidence of human feeling in their tyrant when the next day brought them a further surprise.

Toward five in the afternoon Dossonville, with the evident purpose of impressing his enemies by a new accession of strength, made his appearance, with a body-guard of two. The onlookers, enjoying the amazement of the Marseillais, were yet themselves astonished and perplexed at the incongruity of the new reinforcement.

One, short and contracted, gave the impression that by some mysterious settling his head had shrunk on his shoulders, his shoulders had moved toward his waist, and by this gradual process his whole body had been telescoped into his legs. A huge, flattened nose, or rather beak, imposed itself upon the yellowish, parched face and empty cheeks, while from two slits under the overhanging brows, the half-hidden eyes, without deviating from their forward direction, absorbed the outer world.

His companion, in contrast to the dragging gait of his fellow, moved in short steps, picking up his feet. The sharp nose, set as close as is possible to the perpendicular, pointed the way to the head, which, set forward on the craning neck, seemed in turn to be running ahead of the frail body.

Dossonville, with his loose amble and important tilt of head, gave the cabaret a "Salut!" and continued twirling in his hand for his only weapon an ivory baton a scant two feet in length. Behind him the watch-dogs paused, one grim, taciturn, and furtive, the other loquacious, florid of gesture, and loud, while, as a cur at the approach of a strange dog draws himself up snarling and apprehensive, Javogues and the three half started from their chairs.

Satisfied with the discomfiture of the Terrorists, Dossonville led his followers to the Place de la Revolution, where he found the execution over and the crowd, with a scattering hand-clap, dispersing.

On the terraces of the Tuileries a few spectators still lingered curiously, looking down on the scaffold that violently interrupted the peaceful vista of the woods beyond. Threading his way through the widening network of women, soldiers, spies, muscadins, and laborers, Dossonville perceived Louison, who, having at last quitted the environment of the scaffold, was returning toward the Cabaret de la Guillotine to dispose of her cockades.

"Well, Louison," he cried, "you have a bored air! It was stupid this afternoon, then? The show did not interest?"

"Nothing but a priest to-day--all priests die in the same way," she answered. "However, yesterday it was better. They guillotined twin brothers. That was something out of the ordinary." She added thoughtfully: "It's curious how alike men are on the scaffold."

All at once she perceived the two who had halted obediently at a distance of twenty paces. Dossonville, when her glance had traveled from them to him, and back and forth, in amazement and inquiry, opened his wide mouth and said with pride, indicating them with a flourish:

"Aren't they darlings, though? My assistants, my lambs, my watch-dogs!"

Louison, seized with a sudden, mad laughter, found a moment to say:

"Where, please, did you find such a pair of cutthroats?"

"From the galleys."

"And you trust them?"

"Do you think I'd trust an honest man?" Dossonville exclaimed, with a laugh that left the girl in doubt as to his seriousness. "What is an honest man? A man who has not been sufficiently tempted. Give me the rogue every time. Depend on no man until he is a rogue--a rogue you hold, by his past. With an honest man you are at the mercy of his future." He again designated his assistants. "A word from me would send them to the guillotine. That is the only way to insure tranquillity."

"That's a new theory," Louison exclaimed, much amused. "And there is sense in it. What do you call them, your trusty rogues?"

"You see the short one with the borrowed legs?" Dossonville answered proudly. "I call him Le Corbeau, from his beak and blinking eyes. I picked him up in the Cour des Miracles, ex-beggar, ex-cripple, ex-thief, hidden in a cellar. I offered him protection from arrest in return for services. He accepted; I supplied a coat and a hat, and there he is.

"The other who stands there shaking in the wind is Sans-Chagrin, ex-priest, recanted and reformed. On the subject of our bargain I say nothing, only that I dispose of his neck as easily as mine." Dismissing them by a signal, he took Louison's arm. "Now for us. What do you say to a drop of something in the Rue de Bourgogne?"

"I say, on to the Rue de Bourgogne!"

At the scaffold they made a detour to escape the contact of blood, which made the place abhorrent and carried on the shoes of those who passed in front of the scaffold the red trail for blocks about.

Louison, as they went, was crying her cockades, when suddenly they were aware of a shrinking and a widening in the crowd, and looking up, perceived Sanson, the executioner, and his sons advancing, impassive to all demonstrations. Seized with a mad desire, the girl stepped toward them, crying:

"A cockade, Citoyen Sanson, a red cockade!"

The next moment Dossonville had jerked her away.

"Mordieu, Louison!" he cried angrily. "Why did you do that?"

"Why not?" she said, laughing. "The Revolution has abolished prejudices!"

"It cannot change human nature," he retorted. "You can call him Executor of Public Judgments, Avenger of the Nation, he is always the executioner." He added frankly, "Louison, ma belle, there are really moments when you are not human. At an execution you are like granite!"

"Very well, do not notice me."

"That's easy to say," he grumbled. "Besides, I'm curious."

"Indeed."

"Barabant has been telling me about that extraordinary mother of yours."

"Barabant?" Louison said uneasily. "He doesn't like me."

"I like nothing so well as a mystery," Dossonville continued enthusiastically. "I have three plans already to make her speak."

"Five would do no good."

"Why not?"

"She has left for the provinces."

"Diable!"

"Besides, I do not care to be mysterious," she said impatiently, "and I do not like to be thought strange."

"Speak no more of it," said Dossonville, though inwardly relinquishing nothing of his purpose. "In future I'll consider you only as a commonplace woman."

Louison regarded him maliciously.

"Determine that for yourself."

"Satané de femme!" he exclaimed. "I'll be very careful what I determine. Louison, you are not a woman who can be loved comfortably. I tell it to you frankly. The place seems good; let us sit down."

* * * * *

Several nights later, Dossonville, resting on his rounds, was seated at a table in front of the Café de Valmy, in the Quartier des Bonnes Nouvelles. The bells had announced the midnight; from the intersections of the square the streets yawned to him out of the impenetrable darkness.

For once Dossonville abandoned himself to reverie--a mood evoked by the memory of Louison. Since his encounter, the mystery of her birth had continually teased his imagination. The terror of la Mère Baudrier when Louison had announced the discovery of her father, and again the mother's strange rendezvous in the Square de la Bastille, suggested such an unusual solution, without offering a clue, that his mind returned again and again to the problem.

In another corner, Sans-Chagrin, late in his cups, disputed with the host upon the value of religion, while Le Corbeau, who by his silence gained the majority of the decanter, pretended indifference to the discussion.

"I know what I say," Sans-Chagrin was declaiming. "Religion is a farce and the Assembly will do well to abolish it!"

"That is not so certain," objected the listener.

"It will come."

"Perhaps--"

"Religion will be abolished! I know what I'm saying. I was a priest myself."

"Come, now!"

"True. They expelled me. And why? Why? Tell me that."

"Out with it."

"For instituting reforms. Religion is a farce!"

A woman, scenting a story, issued from the door, and leaning on the shoulder of her husband, said:

"Come, Citoyen Sans-Chagrin, tell us of that."

"I reformed the confessional," Sans-Chagrin began querulously. "Aye, and it needed it, too. Every day and every hour I had to be disturbed for a confession. I said to myself, if there's so much wickedness, it's because the confessional isn't rigid enough. That's logical, isn't it?"

"And what did you do?"

"Only this. I announced that, in future, to avert confusion and to better impress the penitent with his crime, I would hear confessions thus:

"On Monday, all the liars.

"On Tuesday, all the misers.

"On Wednesday, all the slanderers.

"On Thursday, all the thieves.

"On Friday, all the libertines.

"On Saturday, all women who lead bad lives."

His listeners burst out laughing, while the woman said, "And no one came?"

"No one came!" Sans-Chagrin repeated indignantly. "No one came! And the Church, instead of adopting the reform, expelled me. They said I wanted to be rid of confessions. What a farce, my friends, what a mockery!" He spread out his arms in appeal to their judgment, slapped his chest three times, and fell back loosely in his chair, exclaiming, "Oh, oh, oh!"

Dossonville, who had lent a moment's amused attention to this farcical recital, rose and returned to the march, a manoeuver which caused Sans-Chagrin and Le Corbeau to choke in their haste to empty the decanter.

They had gone but a short distance when Dossonville's ear caught the slight rasp of a window opening overhead. Flattening himself against the wall, he covered his lantern with his cloak, with a whispered caution to his followers as the window continued to give forth its low complaint. There was a minute's silence, and then it was drawn shut, and the slight click of a bolt was heard.

Hearing nothing further, Dossonville finally resumed his walk, but at the next corner some one muffled in a cloak fell into his arms.

The man, with a dozen pardons, sought to make a detour, but Dossonville's long arm, shooting out, grasped his shoulder.

"Not so fast, citoyen. There's a little formality we must not forget. Name and errand?"

The stranger, perceiving him neither to be surrounded with pistols and knives nor to have a very threatening air, answered:

"Citoyen Clappier, Section des Bonnes Nouvelles. I am hurrying to seek a doctor."

"Show your card of citizenship, and pass."

"The devil!" the man exclaimed, after a show of searching in his pockets. "I forgot to take it out of the coat I wore this morning."

"Really, citoyen, you are in bad luck," Dossonville replied. "I shall be forced to accompany you." He summoned Sans-Chagrin and Le Corbeau out of the shadow, and gave him into their charge, with a "Lead the way!" Then he dropped behind, murmuring, "Provided one does not enter that doctor's by the window."

They journeyed silently for several minutes, until suddenly the three ahead halted, and Sans-Chagrin, returning, said:

"The citoyen wishes to speak with you."

Dossonville, who had expected this dénouement, had the prisoner brought to him.

"Well, citoyen, what is it?"

"Citoyen, I ask a moment's private conversation."

"With me?"

"With you alone."

"It is important, then?"

"Very."

"Good!"

Perceiving that their walk had brought them near to their starting-point, Dossonville led the way to the Café de Valmy, passing through which, he entered a small room, giving orders to his body-guard to remain without. Then shutting the door, he straddled a chair, rested his arms on the back, and with a smile awaited the opening.

"Citoyen Dossonville--" the man began.

"What! You know me?"

"For a long time."

"Indeed!" Dossonville exclaimed, astounded and nonplussed by this knowledge.

"Citoyen Dossonville," the man continued, "I ask of you one promise. If I convince you of my patriotism and my citizenship, will you guard my secret? I ask you as a man of honor."

Dossonville inclined his head.

"Agreed. I promise to keep the secret, on condition that you convince me of your patriotism--that is, by showing me your true card of citizenship."

"That will not be necessary."

Throwing back his cloak, he removed a wig and mustaches, discovering to Dossonville the features of Sanson, the executioner.

"Do you recognize me?"

At this sinister figure, Dossonville recoiled with a movement beyond his control, but recovering, he exclaimed:

"Pardon."

"It is nothing," Sanson answered flatly. "I am used to it."

"Pardon. What surprises me is this," said Dossonville, hiding his own emotion. "That you who have been imprisoned for suspected Royalist interests should expose yourself to suspicion for any cause."

"Have you not guessed my errand?" Sanson said, with a frown.

"Until you disclosed your identity, yes," Dossonville retorted sharply. "But such adventures do not necessitate a disguise at one o'clock in the night. Citoyen Sanson, had I met you otherwise, I should have nothing to say; but disguised and under a false name is different. I shall have to report it."

Sanson reseated himself.

"For thirty years I have assumed disguises and another name. Do you need to be told the reason? You yourself gave it but a moment ago,"--he paused,--"when you recoiled."

"I do not understand," Dossonville said coldly, resolved to push him to the end. "Explain fully. If I am to risk myself thus, I must know all."

"What you cannot understand--you cannot understand!" Sanson broke out irritably, while his eyes sought the face of his captor, doubting the sincerity of the objection. The movement of anger passed; recognizing the peril of his position, he extended his hand and began in a flat, monotonous voice:

"Citoyen Dossonville, it is disagreeable, but I cannot make conditions. Citoyen, I need not tell you that we have always lived apart from society. As far back as we know, every male of our family, from father to son, has been of the same profession. All others are barred to us. Three have tried to bury themselves in the outer world. They were driven back. Every woman has married an executioner, every man a daughter of one. The office I hold was given Charles Sanson in the year 1688. My grandfather, my father, and myself have inherited it. It will descend from son to son, whether King or Republic succeeds. Nothing will ever change that!"

He paused a moment in distaste before continuing:

"When we appear in public, a space is opened to us. We pass in any crowd without touching a shoulder. The poor, to whom we give alms, recoil before our touch. The woman who would speak to us would be cast out, as a pariah. But no woman, recognizing us, would wish to speak to us. We had hoped the Revolution would free us from the universal prejudice--vain hope!" Then, as though he had said enough, he broke off acridly: "And yet you cannot understand why I disguise myself?"

Dossonville, lost in the strange vista which the recital had opened to his imagination, did not at once reply.

"And you keep the secret from every one?" he asked at last.

Sanson, perceiving the question was one of personal curiosity, replied curtly:

"I have said that no woman knowing us has ever spoken to us. I should have said, except one." He smiled, if the curling of his lips could be called a smile. "A bouquetière who was with you one day on the Place de la Revolution."

"The story is on your word alone," Dossonville said, irritated by this allusion. "It lacks evidence."

"Then you do not remember me?" Sanson said.

Dossonville, startled at the turn, for a moment lost his self-possession as he strove to penetrate the allusion.

"Citoyen Dossonville, can you recall the Café Procopé about twenty years ago, and a certain Simon Lajoie who sometimes played a game of checkers with you in the evening, and who inspired you with a great deal of curiosity?"

"Perfectly," Dossonville replied, staring at him in perplexity.

"Do you remember that his visits ceased the day your interest prompted you to follow him from the café?"

"What!" Dossonville cried, rising, and extending his hand in question. "It was--?"

"It was I."

"Tonnerre de Dieu!"

And falling back, he stared in empty, stupid amazement.

"Are you convinced?"

"I am."

"I hold your promise?"

"Yes."

Sanson readjusted his disguise, while Dossonville sought some pretext to retain him and make him talk.

"Citoyen, one question."

"Well, what?"

"I should like to know," Dossonville said, "does the popular hatred affect you?"

Sanson frowned, hesitated, and then answered in two words eloquent with meaning:

"Not now."

Then, without offering his hand, he turned, saying peremptorily:

"Adieu!"

Sans-Chagrin and Le Corbeau, who would not have allowed the devil himself to pass without an order, brought him back. Then Dossonville, springing to his feet, cried:

"Set the Citoyen Clappier free! The Citoyen Clappier is an industrious patriot!"

V

CRAMOISIN PLOTS AGAINST NICOLE

Cramoisin, since the day of his humiliation before Geneviève, had vented his spite on Barabant, seeking thus his vengeance on Nicole. Several times, in measure as the trial of the Girondins neared its end and it became evident that their condemnation was inevitable, he had sounded Javogues on the score of Barabant, only to be repulsed with decided negatives. But each defeat, by feeding fuel to his hatred, only increased his determination. Convinced, at length, that nothing could be accomplished for the present through Javogues, he had recourse to la Mère Corniche, hoping to find in her an ally.

The shrewd little woman was not long in perceiving his intention. So having sufficiently enjoyed his timid skirmishes, she summoned him to her early one morning, after the distribution of bread, and said point-blank:

"Out with it. What do you want to say to me?"

The face of Cramoisin artfully showed surprise.

"Come, old fellow, let us understand each other. You hate Barabant, eh?"

"Barabant is a Girondin," Cramoisin ventured, and then, deceived by her mood, he plunged on: "He is a Moderate, a contre-Révolutionnaire. He is against Robespierre and the Jacobins."

"Not a bit," la Mère Corniche interrupted, having now entrapped him. "He is a follower of the great Marat!"

"Who are you telling that to!" Cramoisin cried contemptuously.

"Hark, old fellow, no airs with me," the concierge retorted sharply. "The Citoyen Barabant came here with a letter to Marat. I saw it. As for you, I know what you're after, my fine patriot,--your eyes are on the girl!"

Cramoisin, now thoroughly alarmed, sought only to retreat.

"Never in the world," he cried indignantly. "Come, mother, you mustn't wrong a fellow-patriot. I bear no hatred to Barabant. I thought him a Girondin; he is always with that cursed Goursac. But if you say he's not, I'm glad to hear it."

"Oui dà, of course you are! You look it," she retorted scornfully. "Come, get out of my way; leave me in peace, old hypocrite. You don't fool me an instant. Be off!"

Cramoisin escaped to the cabaret; la Mère Corniche, mumbling to herself, settled back in her chair; as the distribution of bread ended, the lodgers issued forth with buckets, to get water from the Seine. Resolved to put Barabant on his guard, she had stopped him, when, to her delight, she perceived Cramoisin disappearing into the cabaret in such pitiful fright that she made a pretext and allowed Barabant to depart, resolved to prolong for a few days the agony of the terrified bully.

She began the round of inspection which, at the expense of her strength, she never failed to accomplish each morning. She passed through the empty rooms, scenting and prying, fumbling among papers and garments, viewing one room with a glance, ransacking another for the taint of aristocracy or the earmarks of a traitor.

Arrived on Barabant's landing, she made a satisfied, careless survey of the room, entering to rest from her labors. On a chair, in a state of mending, was the blue redingote the young fellow had worn on his arrival. More from habit than from suspicion, she ran her fingers through the pockets, and drew out the paper they encountered. It was the envelop addressed to Jean Paul Marat.

She regarded it stupidly, contracting her brows, seeking an explanation, before, with a cry, she tore it open. A sheet, empty and white, slipped to the floor. La Mère Corniche, overcome by the evidence of the duplicity, fell back against the wall.

It was five minutes before she could realize how she had been duped. Then from the miser, and the devotee of Marat, a long howl of rage broke forth, and clutching the letter, she fell from the landing, rather than descended the stairs, gained her room, and abandoned herself to the transports of her rage.

A half-hour later she hobbled forth, white but controlled, to the entrance, where, perceiving Cramoisin, she cried with a furious gesture:

"Come here."

At this angry summons the Terrorist would have slunk away had not la Mère Corniche cut off his escape, crying:

"Cramoisin, idiot, imbecile, come here!"

She seized him, trembling at her tone, and impelled him into the entrance, exclaiming:

"You hate Barabant? Answer me, you hate him!"

"I swear--" he began, when she cut him short: "Fool, I despise him! Do you hear me? I despise him!"

While Cramoisin remained, with gaping mouth, incapable of words, the old woman poured out her reviling. At last he asked, in amazement:

"What do you want of me?"

"I want your help to destroy him."

"Then why didn't you say so at first?"

Fearing to be forced into explanations, she abated her fury and more calmly demanded:

"You have a plan; what is it?"

"It's true?" Cramoisin said, still unconvinced. "You'll join me?"

"I swear it."

"We can't convince Javogues," Cramoisin began, "unless we can make Nicole betray him."

"But how?"

"Jealousy."

"Jealousy? Is there cause? Do you know anything?"

"What is necessary we can invent."

"She won't believe it."

"She'll believe it when she hears it from three persons," Cramoisin said, ruffling up his nose and sneering. "A woman'll believe anything three persons tell her. With Boudgoust and Jambony, we are four."

"Is that your plan?" she cried, in disappointment. "It's stupid, impossible!"

Cramoisin continued to argue with her its merits; she accorded it a grunt, then a shake of the head, and finally said:

"Well, yes; it may do. We can try."

"It's agreed, then. We must excite her suspicions,--but nothing definite."

"What, are you going to give me instructions!" la Mère Corniche cried irately. "As though I couldn't handle a woman!"

"Touch hands, then; it's agreed?"

"Yes."

"You must speak the first word," he said hurriedly. "It will be better." Shutting off a reply, he departed, leaving the concierge scowling and angry.

"Oui dà, I'll speak the first word, old schemer. He doesn't want the woman to lay it to him, the toad!"

* * * * *

The next morning, as Nicole was leaving for the flower-market, la Mère Corniche called to her.

"Eh, Nicole, stop a moment." The girl, who feared her, approached reluctantly.

"You're going to the market?"

"Yes."

"To-morrow is Sunday. I want to put some flowers on the tomb of Marat. See what is going cheap this morning and tell me."

"Is that all?"

"You must stop from time to time to give me news," continued la Mère Corniche, taking her hand.

"You know as much as I do."

"You sell flowers every day?"

"Yes."

"Your man doesn't earn enough, then?"

"With the price of food where it is one can't earn too much."

"You are happy?" the old woman asked brusquely.

"Why do you ask that?" Nicole replied, resenting the question.

"There, don't get angry. You may have friends you don't know of." She released her hand, adding: "If you suspect nothing, I'll say no more."

Penetrating readily the stratagem, Nicole laughed over the encounter, and, perceiving the bald attempt to rouse her jealousy, she dismissed the conversation contemptuously from her mind.

Toward midday, however, the insinuation returned, and forgetting her first attitude, she suffered a little at the very shadow of what her imagination could conjure up. She ended by again laughing at her simplicity, nor did her mind recur again to the thought during the day.

That evening, as she passed in front of the Prêtre Pendu, she encountered Cramoisin, who watched her from the corners of his eyes, rubbing his splayed thumb over his lip in such an ironical fashion that she stopped and demanded impatiently:

"Well, what is it? I seem to amuse you."

"Eh, perhaps you do."

"Come, what do you mean by such looks!"

Then rising, he looked her a moment in countenance, and replied:

"Nicole, they told me you were clever."

"Well, what does that mean?"

"It means that you are either very stupid," he said curtly, "or very blind."

Nicole mounted the steps in perplexity, arresting her journey at every landing to ask herself anxiously what he could have meant. In her room she remained blankly at the window, forgetting the meal she had to prepare. Several times she passed her hand across her forehead, as though to rout the unquiet thoughts, but always returned to the same reverie. The church bell ringing five aroused her, and, ashamed to have yielded to such doubts, she said angrily:

"Come, I'm an idiot! I'll tell the whole affair to Barabant when he returns and we will laugh at it together."

Yet when he entered, her resolution forgotten, she rose quickly, and taking him by the arms, looked anxiously in his face.

"What is the matter with you?" he asked. "Why do you look at me so curiously?"

"I was afraid you would do something rash," she said evasively. "What--what of the Girondins?"

"It is hopeless. To-morrow they may be condemned." But only half satisfied, he returned to the question. "Was that all you wanted to know? You looked at me very queerly."

"I don't doubt it," she said quickly. "Ah, Barabant, I am so afraid that you will compromise yourself with them."

"I must decide--and you would not have me a coward, Nicole?"

She defended her position, she repeated the old arguments, she tried to win him from the thought of sacrifice; but of what had happened during the day she said not a word.

"It is getting late," she exclaimed finally. "I must get into line."

"Let me take the whole night," he pleaded; "you are tired."

"No, no. Not at all."

She hurried below, furious at herself for having betrayed to him her unrest, but when she remembered how instantly he had noticed the strangeness of her look, she could not help thinking that a little suspicious.

The next morning she prepared to meet the concierge with a new defiance, but la Mère Corniche did not even raise her head. Cramoisin, to her relief, was absent; only Boudgoust and Jambony were lounging in front of the cabaret. She cast a furtive glance in their direction; they were laughing boisterously.

"They are laughing at me," she thought, all her doubts returning.

She passed a miserable morning, tortured by the fears that now seemed always to have been with her. Unable to bear the tumult within her breast, she determined to recount all to Barabant. If anything existed, she must know it definitely.

Unfortunately, the arrival of Dossonville, who joined them at lunch on the boulevards, prevented the confidence, and during the meal another suggestion added to her suffering. Barabant, in speaking of Dossonville's interest in Louison, expressed his astonishment at the attraction, ending peremptorily:

"As for me,--she repels me."

He had put considerable warmth into his criticism; that and the simple declaration of antagonism made havoc in the imagination of Nicole. She thought the opinion obviously unnecessary. She asked herself if he really were interested in Louison, whom she had always feared, would he not have said exactly what he had. But from logical inquiry she soon flew to conjecture and supposition, to weighing each word and action and seeking a hidden meaning. She thought no longer of confiding in Barabant, but held herself on her guard.

She was not convinced--she but half believed; yet she returned sadly. Her dream was over. Whatever might come, the first breath of jealousy had entered her heart, and, rightly or wrongly, she knew that her tranquillity had departed forever.

VI

BARABANT HESITATES

The Place de la Revolution was choked with the multitude come to witness the end of the Girondins. The populace, indifferent to the sight of two or three executions a day, gathered with common impulse to witness these men, long lifted above their heads, go down to their death in humiliation and disgrace. Many who hungered, cursed them in the need of some object to their hatred; others who feared them, in the savage joy of deliverance; but the mass hooted simply from the delight of seeing them fallen.

Toward one o'clock the procession of five carts, announced by all the tumults of the human voice, cut through the frenzied hordes, who from time to time fell back into silence, astonished at the demeanor of these men; who to insults addressed the crowds with cries of "Vive la République!" or joined in the chorus of the "Marseillaise."

The rumor had circulated that the body of Valazé, who had committed suicide the night before, was to be guillotined with the rest. In the last cart, indeed, the people discovered the corpse stretched among the living.

Arrived at the scaffold, the twenty descended; the one remained. A jailer, to win a laugh, propped up the corpse, crying:

"Hurry up--Valazé's waiting for you."

The crowd applauded with jeers and taunts. The Girondins meanwhile ranged themselves at the foot of the scaffold. When their number was complete, with one movement they embraced.

Several, turning toward the public, lifted up their arms and repeated the cry:

"Vive la République!"

Then, drawn up one against the other, giving front to the torrent of their enemies, forgetting even their individualities in the supreme moment, the condemned began the hymn of the Republic:

"Allons, enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé."

Every two minutes one of the fraternity left the ranks and ascended the ladder; but the chorus continued, uninterrupted either by the wild acclaim that greeted the appearance of each victim on the scaffold, or by the thundering shout that told of the severed head.

The chorus thinned to three, to two, to one. The last, without ceasing the chant, mounted to the platform; only the knife interrupted the song.

Then, as far as the eye could travel, over the immense square, over the packed bridges and distant, darkened streets, like an immense flight of released birds there appeared above the crowd the red flutter of agitated liberty-caps. The populace, who believed that from out this hecatomb would come relief from famine, bread and meat to save them, shouted frantically. They also shouted who feared to be silent. The uproar continued for ten minutes before the mass disintegrated.

As Goursac, with heavy heart yielding to the impulse of the crowd, sought his friends, from whom he had separated for the sake of prudence, a touch on his arm checked his progress. To his surprise, he encountered the solemn face of Le Corbeau.

"What do you wish?"

"To talk with you," the lips answered, but the eyes said, "You are under arrest."

"I was expecting it," he replied calmly, "but not from this quarter." He sought his friends, but the movement of the crowd had divided them. "After all, it is better so," he said to himself; "farewell would be equivalent to a warrant." He turned to his captor: "Where are you taking me?"

Le Corbeau, without change of feature, ignored the question and kept the silence. Resigning himself to the situation, Goursac allowed himself to be conducted with the crowd; but all at once, as they entered the Rue Antoine, he felt an impress on his other arm and another voice saying:

"This way."

This time he perceived Sans-Chagrin, who, without other recognition, drew him off the thoroughfare. They penetrated abruptly into a nest of narrow streets, winding and twisting in a manner that left him completely in doubt as to their direction. But as their general progress seemed to be leading them toward the Cour des Miracles, that cesspool of beggars, thieves, and cutthroats, he began to fear that this capture had some other design in view than his imprisonment.

He quitted his attitude of indifference and summoned all his faculties to find a reason for this strange course. Observing that at each corner they turned his captors were forcing him into a wider circle, the conviction grew in him that they took this subterfuge to see if they were followed. At the next corner he himself turned--without success. But at the third attempt he distinguished, lurking behind, the three incongruous figures of Cramoisin, Boudgoust, and Jambony!

Then no longer doubting that he was being led to his death, he resolved that no weakness of his should add to the satisfaction of his enemies.

But at this moment, as for the twentieth time they turned a corner, he was seized under the arms and rushed at a run down an alley. Through an entrance in the end he was propelled through courts, hallways, and passages innumerable, and suddenly emerged into a distant street.

Goursac, now utterly at a loss, made no resistance to this sudden doubling. Only when, after a few anxious blocks, he perceived that they were no longer followed, he again sought to enter into conversation with Sans-Chagrin, to be met by the same obstinate silence.

Their attitude increased his perplexity, which was now augmented by their totally ignoring the direction of the prisons and striking out for the barriers of the city. Not until the Barrière du Trône Renversé itself was in sight did his captors stop. Entering an inn, they gave a sign of recognition to the host, passed down a hallway, and pushed their prisoner into a large room, where he found himself in the presence of Dossonville. At the sight of the agent de sûreté, Goursac drew himself up haughtily.

"So, Citoyen Dossonville, you turn with the wind," he said. "I did not suspect your versatility."

"Heavens, my dear Goursac, yes!" cried Dossonville. "But if I go with the wind, I hope to be of some use to those who oppose it." He pointed to the table. "That package will interest you."

"There is some mistake," Goursac said, as he scanned the document. "This is a passport for the Citoyen Jacques Monestier."

"Well, what of that--Citoyen Monestier?"

Goursac looked at the passport, and from it to the laughing countenance of Dossonville.

"Then it was to save me," he said slowly, "that you had me arrested?"

"Parbleu! You are waking up!"

With one bound, Goursac caught Dossonville in his arms.

"Pardon, pardon! What a fool I am!" he cried. "My noble, my generous friend! Head of an ass that I have on my shoulders! You risk your life for mine! Thanks, thanks; a thousand times, thanks!"

"Good!" Dossonville broke in. "We understand each other now. We have but little time; listen to me." He stopped the other in the torrent of his protestations. "Only remember this, that if a weather-vane turns to every breeze, it relinquishes its base not a jot, not even to the hurricane. I find therein a great moral." He dismissed the thought with a gesture. "Now for you. You must pass the gates immediately. When Javogues discovers your escape, he may give orders to watch all the gates. See here, my friend--you must listen to me."

Goursac was paying not the slightest attention. Seated on a chair, his face aglow, he regarded Dossonville with almost adoration, while from time to time his emotion exploded in words.

"Dossonville, you are heroic! You are sublime! Oh, if I only could acquaint the world with such an action! Magnificent! Heroic! Heroic, I tell you!"

Dossonville, perceiving his joy, thought to himself, "Yes, heroism before death is all very well, but how the hope of life transforms a man!" Aloud he continued, "Take the passport and hurry."

Then Goursac, retreating a step, said but one word:

"No!"

But in the word, with the flash of his eye, with the toss of his head, with the resolution of his lips, there was the eloquence of an oration.

This time it was Dossonville who was overcome with astonishment.

"You are mad!" he exclaimed, seizing him by the lapel. "If you return, it is to the guillotine."

"So be it!"

"Reflect."

"I have. Had I wished to save myself, I should have done so long ago."

"Then you seek death?"

"I will not fly from the scum," Goursac said proudly. "I am a Girondin and a Frenchman. When I can no longer live as a Girondin, I am ready to die as a Frenchman. Liberty? What do you offer me? Exile and a daily cringing from discovery, a miserable, hunted existence in the mud and rain? No!" He took a step forward and grasped his hand. "For what you have risked for me accept my benediction; may it bring good luck."

"At least, take the passport," said Dossonville, desperately, holding it out to him, "so that if you change your mind--"

"So that I may not change my mind--there."

With a rapid motion Goursac tore the passport in two, embraced Dossonville, and went out. Before the Prêtre Pendu, Cramoisin, Boudgoust, and Jambony, more dead than alive, hung their heads in terror while Javogues, like a wounded bull, strode backward and forward before them, filling the air with his imprecations.

"Come, you lie, one and all. You lie, Cramoisin; you lie, Boudgoust; you lie, Jambony. He has bought you with gold! You have sold yourselves!"

"I swear they escaped us through some passage!" Boudgoust cried.

"We searched an hour," Cramoisin put in.

"Shut up!"

Javogues seized him furiously by the shoulders, and approaching his gleaming eyes as though to force the truth from his face, he shouted:

"You lie! You lie! I see you lie!"

Abandoning him, he seized Jambony, shaking him like a whip; but as he opened his mouth to roar forth fresh denunciations, he stopped short and dropped the cub in amazement. At the same moment a murmur ran throughout the crowd, which, parting, disclosed the approaching figure of Goursac.

The Girondin perceived his enemies by the same motion of the crowd; but without faltering, he continued nodding to the acquaintances who now shrank before him.

He had passed the cabaret and was almost at the entrance of No. 38 before Javogues could recover. Then, with a roar, he cried:

"Stop!"

Goursac wheeled, returned, and halted.

"What do you wish of me?"

Javogues, brought thus to the long-desired moment, folded his arms and said brutally:

"You do not rejoice, citoyen, at the death of traitors."

"I always rejoice at the death of traitors."

"You rejoice to-day, then?"

"I grieve."

He pronounced the words sadly.

"You are against the Revolution. Say it."

"I believe the Revolution is so great that its ideas can survive even the massacre that you assassins have begun." Then interrupting the catechism disdainfully, he said: "Enough. I should never have survived this day. Arrest me."

Javogues, too overcome with rage for utterance, consigned him with a furious gesture to his body-guard. From all sides went up a shout of hatred and anger. Children and women crowded about, vying with one another to insult the prisoner; men shook their fists in his face and hooted. Amid curses and raillery, the Girondin walked with collected steps, looking into the ranks of his foes with steady eyes.

They had gone but a block when they encountered Nicole and Barabant. At the sight of Goursac in custody, surrounded by the snarling pack, the two, obeying only their generous impulses, sprang forward with outstretched hands:

"What, you, my friend!" Nicole cried, in astonishment and sorrow. "They have arrested you!"

"No, they are liberating me," he answered, with a smile. He pressed their hands. "Adieu, Nicole; adieu, Barabant; and thanks."

But suddenly the voice of la Mère Corniche rose shrilly:

"He is the friend of the Girondin. He is contre-révolutionnaire. Arrest the man Barabant!"

Cramoisin took up the cry.

"He who pities an enemy of the Nation is a traitor. Arrest him!"

Boudgoust and Jambony, joining in, shouted:

"Arrest him! Arrest him!"

In the abject crowd, terrified by these four men, a murmur, a muttering, a rumble, circulated, which it waited to convert into either protest or approval as Javogues should pronounce.

As the Marseillais unwillingly approached, Nicole, dragging Barabant back, whispered in his ear that eternal cry of woman:

"Save thyself. Thy life belongs to me."

"Citoyen Barabant," Javogues said sternly, "did you greet this man as a Girondin?"

"I greeted him," Barabant said slowly, "as a man who has done me kindnesses in the past."

Before this allusion to his own indebtedness Javogues hesitated, but the cries of the crowd urged him on.

"He evades the question!"

"He's a Girondin!"

"Ask him if he's a Girondin!"

The last cry, from la Mère Corniche, imposed itself above the rest.

"Citoyen Barabant," Javogues asked, "are you a Girondin?"

As Barabant hesitated, Nicole sought the glance of Goursac, invoking his aid. The Girondin, who saw no one but her, perceiving her motive, thought bitterly: "I die, and she cannot spare me a look of pity!"

The crowd was clamoring.

"He hesitates!"

"He refuses!"

"Arrest him!"

At their cries, Barabant decided.

"I am not a Girondin," he said.

A chorus of approval greeted the renunciation, but la Mère Corniche, not to be balked, cried:

"He is deceiving us!"

Those who wished to save him called to him: "Cry, Vive les Jacobins!"

Barabant, all escape denied him, shouted:

"Vive la Nation! Vive les Jacobins!"

Then, while la Mère Corniche and the three were silent in helpless rage, the crowd, which adored Barabant, surrounded him, slapping him on the shoulders, shaking his hand, congratulating him. With one accord the shout went up: "Vive Barabant!"

When the shouting died, Nicole heard the rasping voice of Goursac saying to his captors with triumphant sarcasm:

"I see no further need of delay; proceed."

VII

THE MADNESS OF JEALOUSY

The victory was to the woman, but it was a victory fraught with menace. Nicole understood her danger, but in her anxiety she adopted the wrong defense. On the stairway she infolded Barabant with her arm, seeking to communicate to his depressed body the gaiety and relief in hers, while with all the artifices of the woman who feels herself menaced she sought to belittle the importance of the scene, little realizing the deep wound to the pride of Barabant.

"It was for me you did it," she whispered. "You would not leave me. I alone understood."

He did not answer, and once in their room, fell into a chair, burying his head in his hands. Alarmed at his obstinate silence, Nicole, groping for the right attitude, began to reason, walking the floor in her earnestness.

"After all, mon ami, that is what the Terrorists want--to guillotine the Moderates. Goursac was foolish; he played into the hands of his enemies. You are wise. The duty of the Moderates is to keep silent, to preserve themselves for the good of the Nation. How can you serve the Nation without your head? The times will change, mon ami, and you'll be here to help set things aright."

"Oh, that voice," cried Barabant, "I hear it always."

"Mon ami, you are suffering!" she exclaimed. "I know. I understand."

She threw herself at his feet, trying to separate his hands, seeking to take his head upon her shoulder; but Barabant resisted, saying:

"No, Nicole, no; leave me to myself."

"Don't put me away," she begged. "You are suffering; let me share it."

He took her hands from his neck and compelled her to rise. She went to the window, twice turning to look at the dejected figure that remained unaware of her glances.

"I have made a blunder. Yes, I have made a blunder," she said to herself, pressing her hand against her lips to quell the rising sob. "He blames me."

The next morning she received another shock when he informed her that he wished to be alone all day.

"Then we don't lunch together?" she cried, frightened.

"Not to-day."

Not daring to contradict him, she let him go without a word.

"He blames me. He blames me," she told herself, until all at once, like a thunderclap, came the thought: "Or is it only a pretext?"

Her judgment tumbled before the suggestion, and on the moment she was surrounded by the old doubts. She hurried out, morbidly sensitive to the glances of the concierge, of the loiterers before the cabaret, of the bouquetières her comrades; seeing everywhere mocking glances or looks of sympathy. Despite Barabant's wish and her better judgment, she scoured his haunts with the one desire to know what he was doing.

After a day of agony spent in fruitless travel, she returned to their room, without a glimpse of Barabant. Having prepared the meal, she sat down before the fire to wait impatiently the hour of seven, when he would return. Beside her chair she placed a redingote of his and sewing-material. In the disorder of her mind all her naturalness had departed, and seeking everything with artifices, she wished him to come upon her as she watched their supper and busied herself with his wardrobe.

"That will soften his resentment, perhaps," she thought. "And that everything may be cheerful, I must be singing."

So, when later the stairs gave out the sounds of footsteps, she hurriedly possessed the mending, humming as she sewed; but the steps ceased two flights below. The redingote slipped from her hands, the song stopped, and, overcome with disappointment, she cried:

"Oh, mon Dieu, it is not he!"

When seven arrived and she began to be anxious, she consoled herself with the thought that the effect would be better if he found her waiting without complaint. A burning smell warned her that the dinner was spoiling. She removed the pots from the fire, placing them for warmth in the ashes, and, abandoning all thought of the picture she had imagined, went to the window, where she remained, pressing her hands against her temples, staring into the misty night.

At nine o'clock she returned into the middle of the room, and looking about at the scene of her happiness, she said with conviction:

"It is ended!"

Traveling ceaselessly back and forth like a panther, she cried: "Yes, yes, it is ended!" Still, as long as she repeated it, she continued to hope, and at each fancied creak she ran to the landing, leaning over to catch his first footfall. But when she returned, she still said:

"No, no; I knew it. It is ended--ended!"

At ten she ceased to repeat it,--she was convinced. She collapsed on the bed, brain and body incapable of effort, while the cruel minutes, in their inexorable procession, inflicted each a separate torture.

When midnight announced itself, the last thread of hope snapped within her. She bounded up, lit a candle, descended the flight, and entered the room, calling, "Goursac!"

She had forgotten the arrest. The fact appeared to her as an evil omen, presaging calamity.

In fear of the sepulchral stillness, she fled back, rushing in a panic to her room, where she gazed about helplessly, asking herself what she was to do. All at once, at the window, staring at her old room, she cried:

"If it is Louison!" And emitting an "Ah!" that had in it the note of murder, she passed out of the window.

The night was filled with fog, out of which descended the sharp sting of rain. She moved slowly, her body pressed to the roof, seeing with her fingers until the dormer-window struck against her foot. Once into Louison's room, she crept to the bed, stretching out her hand. It was empty.

"Oh! oh! oh!"

The cry was of something collapsing in her soul. Without returning to her room, she sped down the stairs, through the two courts, and into the street. In her unheeding rush, she turned to the right, missing Barabant, who was at the moment returning from the opposite direction.

When she could run no longer, she dropped into a walk until, recovering her breath, she broke again into a run. At the street corners the bracketed lanterns suffused the fog with a floating radiance that guided her over the glistening, slippery stones. The mist that threatened the world with a destiny of gloom, the rain that gathered on her eyelashes and weighted her hair, she welcomed as the fitting touch to her misery; but the chill abated not a jot of the fever in her veins. Out of the blurred night occasionally long lines of watchers emerged, crouching under shawls, hugging the walls to escape the rain. A dozen brutish arms snatched at her, but eluding all, she arrived, panting and trembling, at her destination, crying to the servant who answered her knock:

"Citoyenne, is this the Committee of Safety?"

"Yes."

"I must see them."

"Do you come to denounce some one?"

"I do."

"Enter."

Nicole found herself in a hall.

"Name, citoyenne?"

"The Citoyenne Nicole, bouquetière. The Citoyen Couthon will know me."

The servant passed to a door at the back and knocked timidly. At the second repetition a voice cried:

"Come in."

The door opened on a group of men about a table littered with papers.

"What is it?"

"A citoyenne who wishes to make a denunciation."

"Name?"

"The Citoyenne Nicole, bouquetière."

"Tiens! I know her," exclaimed a voice. The spokesman, on this evidence, gave a sign of permission to the servant, who ushered in Nicole.

A voice said approvingly:

"Look--she is pretty."

"Haven't the time."

Several, attracted by the exclamation, gave her a casual glance; the rest, without raising their heads, continued the low hum of their conference. From the farther side a man wrapped in blankets, deformed, infirm, seized with sudden chills, greeted her.

"Well, Nicole, you've come to denounce some one? That's right."

"Citoyen Couthon," Nicole blurted, "I--"

At the aspect of these machine-like men industriously busy with the lists that fed the guillotine, all her anger dissolved--she could not pronounce there the name she had loved.

"Well, well," Couthon said encouragingly, "you want to denounce whom? Come, let us get at it. Not the Citoyen Eugène Barabant, at least," he said, with a good-natured leer.

The sound of that name in this spot, without pity, terrified Nicole; she now sought only an excuse to retreat.

"What name's that?" cried a little man from the table. "Eugène Barabant? Wait a moment; wait a moment. Let me search."

Couthon lounged to the side of the speaker, who, turning to his neighbor, demanded the list of suspects to be arrested, while Nicole, flattened against the wall, dazed by a sudden fear, remained trembling at the snatches of conversation that reached her.

"A man offered me one thousand livres to-day if I'd slip in the name of his wife."

"That was cheap!"

"Héron is becoming insupportable. He's sent in the name of every one in his building. To-day it's the woman above him."

"She makes too much noise, no doubt."

"What's the difference? The Nation needs the funds. We must coin money on the Place de la Revolution; the guillotine is the mint of the Nation."

"You're a financier."

"I'm proud of it. Guillotine the rich--there's my finance."

Couthon raised his head.

"That's strange; I too thought I'd seen the name."

The others, attracted by his exclamation, asked:

"What name?"

"Barabant. Eugène Barabant."

A small man spoke up.

"Denounced last night by the Citoyen Javogues and an old hag the size of a child. Do you remember?"

A chorus of assent greeted him.

"Barabant denounced!" Nicole cried. "Barabant denounced!" She extended her hand. "La Mère Corniche?"

"That's the name."

"Come, Nicole, a lover is easily replaced. I've sacrificed two already to the Nation," Couthon cried. "Don't lose your time; denounce your suspect. We are short to-night."

"A pretty patriot like that has right to a dozen suspects," cried another, amid laughter.

Overwhelmed, dizzy, and horror-stricken, she shook her head, felt with her hands until she found the door, and, backing from the room, fled from the house--fled back through the ghostly city.

Goursac's door was opened; Geneviève herself, with solemn face flushed with the light of her candle, was waiting for her.

"Tell me quick!" she cried, apprehending what had happened.

"You know, then?"

"Know what?"

"Barabant has been arrested."

She recoiled to the wall shrieking:

"Arrested!"

"An hour ago."

"Where?"

"Here."

"Here? Then he came back?"

"Yes."

Without waiting to hear more, she fled to their room. The lantern he had lighted shone over the stone floor, the cheerless walls, and the kinks in the roof. It was all empty--terribly empty. On the bed she perceived the belt and the coat he had left. Forgetting her jealousy, her anger, her mission, remembering only that he had returned, knowing only that her dream was ended, she stretched out her helpless arms and cried:

"Barabant! Barabant!"

Then, overcome with hunger, weariness, and the ravages of her emotion, she slipped to the floor in a heap.

VIII

LA FÊTE DE LA RAISON

On the 20th of Brumaire, day of the Feast of Reason, maddest day the world has ever known, the Revolution, having overturned the social order, abolished the clergy, introduced the monetary system, instituted fraternal banquets, established popular education, and renamed the calendar, now, as though unwilling that aught should exist save in its image, decreed the abolition of religion and set up the cult of Reason. The neighborhood of the Prêtre Pendu, accustomed as it was to the vagaries of its tyrants, was yet astounded at the pitch of frenzy to which exultation stirred the Marseillais and his companions.

The ecstasy of Javogues terrified all with its frantic joy; for him the consummation of the human race had arrived. He spent the morning before the cabaret, astride a vat, dispensing wine and hand-shakes, his arms in the air haranguing the crowd that trembled to be present and dared not stay away.

"Religion is dead!" he bellowed to all comers. "The farce is ended! The impudent bubble is pricked!"

Boudgoust and Jambony, on either side, imitated his fury and his gestures, while Cramoisin, twisting in the crowd, made all he met shout to the cry of:

"Vive la Raison!"

The listeners for the most part simulated enthusiasm, with an eye to escape. A few echoed:

"Down with superstition!"

La Mère Corniche, hobbling into the midst of them, extended her hand to Javogues in rough familiarity, crying:

"Well, my big fellow, are you happy? What a day, hanh? No more superstitions for us! Touch hands."

"Touch there, mother!" Their hands met with a clap. "Didn't I tell you, from the first, there is no God?"

"Aye, you did. He never feared, that man!"

"I say it now," Javogues cried, and thrice he shouted: "There is no God!"

Suddenly, flinging from the vat, he cleared a space about him with his arm, and, seizing Geneviève by the shoulder to steady himself, cried:

"If there is a God, let him strike me down. Let the moment decide between us. I defy him!"

He raised his fist to the sky and remained waiting, while more than one closed their eyes in terror. Then as the skies disgorged no thunderbolt, his arm relaxed, descending to his side, and the scornful lips with a sneer pronounced:

"Bah!"

"Vive Javogues!"

It was the voice of Cramoisin that acclaimed the victor.

Abandoning Geneviève, Javogues caught from the crowd a bakeress and a fille de joie and forced them into each other's arms, crying:

"Embrace; the Revolution declares you sisters!"

Leaving the frightened women cowering, he again seized Geneviève as a prop, and clearing the throng, rolled up the street, invoking each window with the exulting shout:

"Vive la Raison!"

While Cramoisin and Boudgoust combated for the relinquished vat, Jambony, serving the spigot, impudent and mocking, bellowed:

"Citoyens, it is not enough to wipe out cults: we must level the steeples. Steeples are aristocratic. What's the use of making Temples of Reason of the ci-devant churches if steeples are to lord it over us. Steeples are the princes of the city!"

"Citoyen, the Section des Bonnes Nouvelles has already done so!" a woman cried.

"Then Vive la Section des Bonnes Nouvelles!"

With the departure of Javogues the crowd grew noisy, disputing and haranguing. From the top of the vat, which he had gained, Cramoisin bellowed in vain to them to listen to his ideas on the primeval innocence and the community of women. The throng had turned to another who, applauding the laws of burial, declared, beyond interring each citoyen under the simple tricolor flag, perfect equality could be obtained only by identical tombstones.

All at once la Mère Corniche, who had remained on the fringe of the crowd, shrank into it with an exclamation of fear. At the entrance of No. 38 appeared Nicole. On her face was the brooding and the color of death. For a moment she leaned against the wall, searching uneasily among the crowd. Then, still seeking, she approached, swaying from side to side, and her eye fell on la Mère Corniche--and passed.

"It is not I," the old woman muttered, still trembling from the suspense. "It's Cramoisin."

Then as Nicole, shaking her head, turned wearily and went down the street, rubbing from time to time against the wall, la Mère Corniche said to herself, "Ah, it is Javogues!"

She sought the eye of Cramoisin. He was still on the vat, struck dumb in the midst of a furious harangue, following the girl as she disappeared from sight.

* * * * *

The concierge, in her fear, had guessed rightly: Nicole sought the Marseillais. Her doubts of Barabant, dispelled on the instant of his arrest, had given place to bitter reproaches, to self-accusation, and to an immense, confused hatred of the man who had betrayed him. The separation was irrevocable; she could see nothing ahead. In the desolation of her hopes her anger turned against the Revolution. Barabant guilty! Barabant, the generous, impulsive advocate of great ideas, a traitor! At such a thought her whole being rose in revolt against the Revolution that would destroy him. Without distinguishing its abuses from its truths, reasoning from men to ideas, revolting at the doctrine of the community of women that menaced her pure ambitions, she saw the Revolution only in the furious figure of Javogues, brutal, despotic, and mad. Shrinking from her comrades, without faith, without hope, adrift, with the figure of Charlotte Corday ever before her, tormented with the thought of martyrdom, she followed Javogues, restlessly keeping him under her eye, seeking him with an instinctive impulse that gradually and fearfully shaped itself in her resolution.

The streets where she wandered were filled with barbaric processions from the sack of the churches. Unshaven heads crowned with gorgeous miters, ragged bodies clothed in purple robes, smudgy arms brandishing golden chalices, crucifixes, and relics swept by with exultant, mocking chorus. In the churchyards troops of beggars demolished monuments and leveled the tombs, while still others beheaded the stone images in the niches of the doors.

Toward night the lowest elements of the social order were unchained. The drunkards, the thieves, the idiots, the pariahs, the beggars, the destitute, the morbidly curious, the shrews, the hags, the harlots; all who hated the good and many who had been taught to regard religion as the shackles that fastened them to servitude, erupted into the night, to mock the Church and dishonor it.

Listless, troubled, and uneasy, through the demented city Nicole continued her search, stopping neither for lunch nor for supper, sorting, without success, each successive throng, while every scene of license and sacrilege that inflamed her anger steadied her resolve.

In the church of St. Gervais she stopped, appalled at the riot. Within, shrieks of laughter mingled with hoarse shouts of men and the surging rhythm of music. Horror and rage possessed her, and she plunged in, seeking Javogues, while her hand went nervously to her breast.

The church was dim with the smoky glimmer of lamps, which veiled the interior in a mantle of fog. The fishwives from the Marché St. Jean offered salted herrings to all comers, poisoning the air and disgusting the nostrils, while on their track followed limonadiers with overtopping tanks, rattling their cups and hawking their beverage.

In the Chapel of the Virgin a hundred couples were dancing, bumping into one another, hilarious with wine and hoarse with shouting; while above the carnival, enthroned on the altar, a blue and white Goddess of Reason, a girl of fifteen, watched the rout, arranging her scarlet liberty-cap or extending her hand with conscious smiles to those who acclaimed her.

Among these women whirling with closed eyes and tumbled hair, among the reeling men, Nicole glided until satisfied that the Marseillais was absent; then she left the unholy halls and ran, panting, to St. Eustache.

There, inside the entrance, the uproar halted her, and she remained, in bewilderment, gazing down the enormous length, asking herself if her senses had departed.

The great vista was transformed into a country-side; at her elbow were rustic huts and clumps of trees, while in the distance, hidden under the foliage of thickets, rose mounds that echoed to the creaking of planks under the rush of feet. Suddenly a hand caught her arm and Dossonville's voice cried:

"Nicole, are you mad!"

Angry at this interruption to her plans, she turned with a gesture of impatience; but Dossonville, without relinquishing his grasp, continued sternly:

"You cannot stay, you cannot!"

"I am going to."

The next moment some one seized her by the waist; she turned with a scream. It was Cramoisin who, unaware of her identity, had caught her.

At the sight of Nicole he relaxed his hold, in such utter terror that he stumbled and fell on his back, when a band of women seized him by the arms and legs and bore him raging into the crowd.

"Diable!" Dossonville muttered to himself. "If the beast recognized me, I am done for." Then taking the girl's arm, he repeated: "Nicole, you cannot remain; it is impossible."

"I can protect myself," she said savagely.

"Nicole--"

"I must stay!"

In a moment Dossonville guessed something of her design, and withdrawing a step, said sternly:

"Whom are you seeking?"

"No one."

"You are meditating something desperate."

"No."

"You will not come?"

She shook her head impatiently.

"Then my life is in your hands; I will not leave you."

Satisfied with this solution, that offered her a certain protection, Nicole inclined her head, and caring little how far she betrayed herself to him, hastened feverishly into the throng. The loathing and hatred which communicated itself to her body banished all other senses; her breast rose tumultuously, her forehead grew ugly with anger, while her restless eyes beheld the saturnalia without comprehension.

Silently she dragged him about the great space. On the altars of the chapels were spilled bouquets and bottles of wine pell-mell with sausages, pâtés, vegetables, and meats. A score of hands clutched the food, scattering it over the steps, splashing the altars with the red stains of wine. The people gorged, drank, embraced, and fell sprawling; while at times, with a drunken cheer, some one in the tangle would hurl a sausage or a ball of dripping bread at the statues and portraits above, crying:

"There's for you, ci-devant Virgin!"

"Eat a little and become a good republican!"

Out of the scramble, boys and girls were thrust forward to plunge their tiny hands into the food in sign of liberty, while bottles of wine, snatched from the famished lips of beggars, were held out to them, until in their intoxication they furnished amusement to the ribald crowd.

"Pass on, pass on," cried Nicole.

A rush of women brushed them against the wall. In the procession were tossing a dozen statues capped with liberty-bonnets. In front of them, a woman, leaping forward, embraced a statue in her arms and bore it crashing to the floor.

At the next chapel, Dossonville felt a sudden tension on his arm. Within, a band of madmen and crazy women were performing a mockery of a mass. Before a half-naked girl in stupor on the altar Boudgoust was kneeling, while Jambony, insolent and sneering, swung a chain of sausages to and fro as censers.

Below the figure of the Goddess of Reason had been placed a hastily constructed guillotine, which Boudgoust elevated and replaced, pouring over it a libation of red wine, announcing:

"The blood of aristocrats we offer thee!"

Then turning, he led the uproarious congregation, crouching below, in a litany:

"St. Guillotine, protector of patriots, pray for us. St. Guillotine, terror of aristocrats, protect us. Lovely machine, have pity on us. Admirable machine, have pity on us. St. Guillotine, deliver us of our enemies!"

"Pass on, pass on," Nicole cried, after the unavailing search.

"If it is not they, it is Javogues," thought Dossonville, who had been wondering whom she was seeking.

They left the chapels and emerged into the aisle, where no sound predominated and everything was heard; where it seemed that Hell, having overturned Heaven, was struggling to annihilate itself in the need of venting its wickedness.

For a moment Nicole forgot herself, aghast at the frenzy of her kind. She raised her eyes in terror to the deep vaults stretching upward undisturbed, serene and awful, as though from the dim regions, which in her childhood she had peopled with visions, the avenging thunderbolt was about to smite the scoffers.

On every side the shouts grew wilder. Vile women, dropping the mask of their sex, pursued men in long, haggard, furious lines over the artificial mounds that groaned under the chase. The half-naked figure of Cramoisin appeared, surrounded by bacchantes, exhorting the crowd to return to the primitive innocence. Forms meaningless and confused flitted, whirled, reeled before them in an unending danse Macabre, while mingled with the tempest came the ever-exultant shout:

"Vive la Raison! Vive la Raison!"

Suddenly, by the catch of her breath and by the involuntary "Ah!" Dossonville knew that Nicole had found Javogues.

Without awaiting her leap, he hurled himself on her and bore her back into a thicket, struggling and pleading and burying her teeth in the hand that muffled her screams. Then when the mad struggles had snapped the bonds of consciousness, he picked her up in his arms and bore her quickly out through the unbridled mob, who broke into applause, believing her overcome with drunkenness.

IX

AS DID CHARLOTTE CORDAY

Behind Dossonville the riot and the tumult fell to a whisper; the titanic upheaval ended with the walls. Above, the night was solemn and gentle, and the Seine, toward which he bore Nicole, unconscious of the revolt, flowed with the serenity of ages. Depositing the girl on a bench, he busied himself with recalling her to the quiet world.

When consciousness returned, it was by flashes where the incoherent words, jumbled and wild, showed she was still in the saturnalia, preparing to spring at the hated figure of the Marseillais. Fearing that her cries would attract a crowd, Dossonville shook her. She opened her eyes, saw him, and sat up, seeking to assemble her thoughts. Then a groan escaped her as memory returned.

"Ah, my friend," she said pitifully, "why did you stop me? It was the moment."

She put down her feet, smoothed her dress, and stood up, while Dossonville, rising, said peremptorily:

"Where are you going now?"

"Home. Give me your arm. You were too strong; I am tired."

"Nicole," Dossonville began, in the hope of diverting her mood, "let us reason a little. That is not the Revolution: that is the scum. Judge it not by that."

"You say that," she answered wearily--"you?"

"Aye, the Revolution has proved too immense, and the leaders too weak. It has rolled over them; but the world is its path, and time will right it."

But Nicole, despite all his artifices, refused to say another word until in the Rue Maugout he cried sternly:

"Nicole, what do you intend to do?"

"Is that so difficult to guess?"

"Nicole! You are not going to take your life!"

"My life?" she answered, shaking her head. "That is all that is left to me to use."

"Javogues's?"

She took his hands, smiling, and said:

"To-night I was mad and you could stop me; now I am calm and you can do nothing. Good night. Forgive me if I have endangered your life. Good night, my friend, good night."

* * * * *

From the profound sleep of exhaustion Nicole, the next morning, struggled to open her eyes with the echo of Goursac's name sounding in her ears.

"Nicole! Hé, Citoyenne Nicole!"

She rushed to the window, and, leaning far out, beheld below in the misty court the abhorrent figures of the three Tapedures. At her appearance they sent up the exultant shout: "Goursac dies to-day!"

"To-day," she repeated dully, watching their departure without emotion.

It was still early, and the weak sun, filtering through the fogs of the November morning, cast yellow shadows where shadows showed at all. Silent and calm, the girl withdrew and began to dress. Within her soul the torment of the last days had given place to quiet. What she had recoiled from doing as an individual now appeared easy to her as the instrument of a high vengeance. In her now were the revolt of womanhood, the anger of the Christian, and the resolution of a Charlotte Corday, which is the resolution of a people.

Slowly and with great care she dressed, examining herself often, selecting her best attire, and as she dressed she began to sing, wondering the while that she could feel so light-hearted. From the bureau she took her dagger and a ring that Barabant had left, slipping it on her finger, saying wistfully:

"Poor Barabant. I might have betrayed you. Ah, I shall make reparation."

In the elevation of her soul he seemed very distant, and the room of her happiness, as she paused meditatively, unreal and no more a part of her life. She went to the bed and knelt, closing her eyes and stretching up her clasped hands. Suddenly she took the dagger from her breast and placed it as a cross before her, fastening her eyes upon it as her lips repeated her prayers.

She rose, passed out of the room, and without a tremor descended the stairs. But at Goursac's landing the sound of voices below compelled her to halt and withdraw into the room. In the turning her skirt caught on a splinter and was torn.

"Ah, what a misfortune!" she said to herself, unconscious of the incongruity of her words. "My best skirt, too."

Her mind, before the immense decision, took refuge in trifles. She sought a pin and occupied herself with hiding the rent, while from time to time she exclaimed impatiently:

"They are taking a long time!"

Unable to remain still, she passed out to the landing, whence, fancying that she had detected the name of Barabant, she stole down the steps as far as the turn would permit, shrinking against the dark walls. Almost immediately the door opened and the voice of Javogues said:

"He shall not escape, I promise it! Within three days Barabant shall look through the little window of Mother Guillotine!"

"But how'll you find him?" replied the querulous voice of la Mère Corniche. "Some one has transferred him from the Luxembourg."

"Never fear. I'll search the prisons and drag him out, in spite of all the Dossonvilles in Paris."

"But when?"

"This morning. There, will that satisfy you, old patriot?"

A grunt came for all reply, and the next moment the ascending flight creaked with the weight of the concierge.

Nicole, thus threatened with immediate discovery, seized her dagger in a desperate resolve, but the advance stopped and the voice of la Mère Corniche whispered:

"Nicole has gone out, hasn't she?"

"No, she is above."

"Then it is better to wait."

To the inexpressible relief of the trembling girl, the old woman turned and descended. Left in security, Nicole resumed her composure. Without fear of failure, without once debating the means she should employ, confident that all that was essential was to be in the presence of the tyrant, she descended, entering the room so softly that Javogues turned with a startled:

"Who's that?"

"Nicole."

"What are you stealing in like a cat for?"

"I have come to speak with you."

"Speak."

"Why do you persecute Barabant?"

"He is a traitor!"

"But he said he was not a Girondin."

"He lied."

"But what is his offense?"

"He would show mercy to the aristocrats."

"Mercy!" she cried. "Have you forgotten to whom you owe your life? You did not scorn his mercy!"

Instead of the expected explosion, Javogues, without resentment, replied:

"Because I remembered that I did not listen when they told me Barabant was contre-révolutionnaire. I have done a great wrong: I considered myself instead of the Nation." He rose with the glance of the fanatic. "Yes, I am guilty--I, Javogues! But I will denounce myself. If the Nation decides that I must be punished, let my head warn others against moderation!"

"Javogues," cried Nicole, recoiling, "have you not a drop of human blood in you? Have you pity for nothing? Does not the sight of all the blood spilled on the guillotine satisfy you?"

"Satisfy me?" he laughed. He elevated his arms, repeating it with a clap of laughter. "That little pool of blood satisfy me? Only an inundation can purify France. Twenty executions a day would not satisfy me. The guillotine is too merciful for traitors. I would drown them by hundreds--these aristocrats--these rich--these Moderates who have crushed us for ages. If those we smite are not guilty, their fathers were! We must be revenged on the ages."

Then addressing Nicole furiously, he cried: "See here, my girl; if you talk of moderation, you'll go, too!"

There was a moment's silence. Then suddenly, from below, she heard the voice of Dossonville calling:

"Nicole! Ho, Nicole!"

Without was life; within the dim room, martyrdom.

"Then you think," she said, looking down, "that Barabant is guilty?"

"He shall die!"

She was smiling with a deceitful smile as she answered:

"You are perhaps right. Moderation is wrong. We have suffered much."

"Well said!" Javogues cried. "There speaks the patriot."

"Nicole! Nicole, come down!" cried the voice without.

"It is that traitor Dossonville," Nicole said, still smiling. "He does not know that Goursac is to die to-day. Call it down to him. That will enrage him."

With a gleam of joy, Javogues turned to the window; but before he had made two steps, Nicole, bounding forward, buried her dagger between the vast shoulders. The hands went frantically into the air, a hideous sound choked in the throat, and, spinning around, the great bulk tottered and collapsed at her feet. A moment before was martyrdom, now nothing but horror.

Hysterical, panic-stricken, holding out her hand before her,--the hand that bore the curse of blood,--the girl fled from the room, shrieking:

"I have killed him!"

At each flight, shivering as though the specter pursued, she repeated:

"I have killed him! I have killed him!"

She rushed from the doorway into the court, haggard, stretching away the accusing hand, and streaked across the court into the arms of Dossonville, screaming always:

"I have killed him!"

Above, the face of Javogues, purple and choking, appeared a moment at the window, and fell back, crying:

"Help! Help!"

From the four walls the windows put forth frightened heads. Two or three half-dressed figures came tumbling into the court. But Dossonville, seizing the maddened girl, rushed her away through the passage and up the street before the startled lodgers could divine what had happened.

X

UNRELENTING IN DEATH

Placing Nicole in safety in the Maison Talaru, a privileged jail, of which the keeper, Schmidt, was his friend, Dossonville, picking up Le Corbeau and Sans-Chagrin, returned to the court, now packed with excited women. Forcing his way through the press, heedless of questions, he mounted the stairs, to find the room of the Marseillais black with the curious crowd, who shouted advice or sobbed hysterically as they strove forward. Raising his voice, Dossonville thundered:

"Silence!"

There was a lull, and a hasty turning of heads.

"In the name of the Nation I summon all citoyens to depart! The Nation takes possession."

Then followed a ludicrous sidling, shifting rush for the door as each, fearing to be marked for arrest, strove to depart unnoticed. All at once the long arm of Dossonville shot out and barred the way.

"Remain!"

Boudgoust fell back. Again, as Cramoisin sought to escape in the shelter of a fat woman, the prohibition rang out:

"Remain!"

Jambony next presenting himself, the arm of Dossonville again denied the way. In the room there remained at last but the wounded man, unconscious on the bed, a bundle of humanity crouching at the head, a doctor, and the three Tapedures huddling together against the wall.

From the doorway, the solemn face of Le Corbeau peered in, flanked by the mocking smirk of Sans-Chagrin. Dossonville, master of the quiet room, strode up and down in indecision, with glowing eyes fastened on the frightened three, who dared not meet the menace of his glance.

After five minutes of this torture, during which all awaited the order of arrest, Dossonville suddenly halted, extended his hand, and cried:

"Pass out!"

Sans-Chagrin, fearing to misinterpret the command, checked the foremost, asking:

"Citoyen, are we to arrest them?"

"Not now."

Confident that the menace would rid the city of the three, Dossonville turned anxiously to the doctor.

"Well, citoyen, what's your verdict?"

"Nothing to be done."

"Will he regain consciousness?"

"It is possible--probable."

Dossonville frowned.

"How long will he live?"

"Not beyond the day."

Desiring to prevent all communication with the outer world, Dossonville said, with a quick resolve:

"Then I shall be forced to establish a guard. The Citoyen Javogues is under arrest."

Turning to Sans-Chagrin, he gave orders to allow no one to enter--a command which had the desired effect of hastening the departure of the doctor. Approaching the bed, Dossonville became aware of the figure at its side, drooped over an arm of the invalid that hung down.

"Mordieu! what's this?" he cried; and placing his hand on the shoulder, he shook it.

The bundle resolved itself into the wild figure of a girl.

"Geneviève!"

At the next moment the girl, recognizing him, flew at him with a cry of hatred. Avoiding the blind rush, Dossonville caught her by the arm, crying:

"Eh, Le Corbeau, take her! Sans-Chagrin, go to his aid!"

Feeling herself overpowered, the girl became suddenly quiet, calculating, and dissimulating; but from her eyes murder looked out.

"Take her below!"

The wild light died out in the girl, who, bursting into tears, cried:

"No, no! Let me stay! Let me stay!"

"Diable! what a complication!" Dossonville thought. Then, aloud, he cried roughly: "Impossible! She must go!"

Geneviève, breaking away, clasped his knees, imploring pity.

"Let me stay, good, kind Dossonville. See, I kiss your hands. I'll be quiet. Let me stay. I love him. I adore him. Don't take me away from him now. I know he's going to die. I'll be quiet. I'll bless you."

"Stay, then!" Dossonville cried angrily. "I am a fool to do it."

The girl, released, flew to the bed and crouched down, laying her cheek against the shaggy arm, while the big eyes looked up with frightened, thankful appeal.

"Go and eat," Dossonville said, turning to Sans-Chagrin and Le Corbeau. Accompanying them to the hall, he added in a whisper: "Mingle with the crowd; convey the idea of an assault. Nicole was defending herself, you know. Return in an hour."

He shut the door, straddled a chair, and folding his arms on the back, with a glance at Geneviève, who continued motionless, entered on his vigil.

In the room the only sound was from the troubled breathing of the wounded man. The girl did not even shift her head; while on his chair Dossonville, like a statue of melancholy, waited the ebbing of life, musing at this end to their conflict, marveling the while at the strange antipathies that set men at each other's throats from their first glance.

All at once Javogues, raising himself on the bed, opened his eyes and stared at Dossonville, who matched the delirious glance with a quiet gaze. Javogues, without deviating, stared stupidly, then as suddenly fell back into apparent insensibility again; while Geneviève, dragging her body along the floor, wound her arms about the bull-neck and whispered in his ear.

Again the Marseillais rose and fastened his uncomprehending stare upon Dossonville. Suddenly, extending his hand, he cried:

"Who's that?"

Falling back, he almost immediately exclaimed:

"It's Dossonville! Ah, Dossonville! Dossonville! Spy! I have you at last!"

"He is still delirious," Dossonville muttered, drawing breath. "I thought he saw me."

"I know it by the look in his eyes!" Javogues cried from the bed. "I'll not give my hand to a spy! Boudgoust, Cramoisin, Jambony, watch him, follow him! Maillard, if he is acquitted, I swear I'll cut his throat!"

At times he was at the siege of the Tuileries, again in the court of the Abbaye, or again back in the cabaret of the Bonnet Rouge on the night of their first encounter. The flash burned itself out again and he dropped into further insensibility.

A knock was heard on the door. Dossonville, shifting slightly, said:

"Come in."

Le Corbeau and Sans-Chagrin tiptoed in and, at a sign, noiselessly took their places against the wall. Slight as was the interruption, it caught the senses of the wounded man and seemed to clear his vision. He opened his eyes and recognized the room. A moment he remained frowning; then, turning to the girl, he said with a note of tenderness:

"Ah, Geneviève!"

A sob escaped from the girl.

"What's the matter with you?" he cried, but immediately added: "Ah, I remember."

Presently he said roughly:

"Tell me, child; what is it?" Then, as the girl buried her face in the bed to choke the sobs, he answered himself: "It is death."

His eyes fixed themselves on the foot of the bed, and a great breath passed through his body. Presently a movement of Sans-Chagrin's crossed his vision, and he raised his glance to Dossonville.

"You are here to see there's no slip," he said scornfully.

"Javogues," Dossonville said impulsively, "I bear you no hatred."

"But I do!" Javogues cried fiercely. "I have never compromised with you. I'll not do it now." Turning to Geneviève, he regarded her a moment, and then said softly: "Kiss me, mignonne; I know you love me." For a moment pain checked his breathing. "Take my hand. That's it. Don't let go of it."

"Javogues, as a mere formality," Dossonville broke in, "do you wish a priest?"

"A priest! Yes, a priest!" Javogues cried, with a laugh of scorn. "Spy, you would make me out a hypocrite!"

"Man, have you no terror of God?"

"There is no God!" With the cry, the Javogues of the mob rose up, carrying Geneviève to her feet.

"Have you no doubts?"

"Bah!"

"And if there be a God?"

"And if there be a God, I do not fear him!" he cried; and in the Titan the unconquerable revolt of the Jacobin flamed out. "If there be a God, he shall answer to me for what he has done! In the name of the slave and the harlot, I'll accuse him; in the name of the galleys and the prison, in the name of those who grind out their lives with the labor of beasts, in the name of the famished and the leper, in the name of those who groan under kings and aristocrats, in the name of the poor, who fight for breath, for food, for sleep--in the name of all misery, I'll accuse him! If there be a God, he shall answer that!"

The effort exhausted him; he collapsed. The listeners, struck with terror at the audacity of the atheist, composed themselves with long breaths.

Dossonville transferred his glance to Geneviève bending over the hand she never quitted. A half-hour passed without a movement from the girl. It began to grow dark, and on the quieter air the sound of voices reached them.

Suddenly Dossonville, waiting patiently, saw the girl raise her head and begin to rub the hand she held. Then she stopped, sank back, and pressed the hand against her heart.

Presently she raised her head and gazed in perplexity at Javogues. She half rose, and dragging her body forward, seized the head between her hands, calling anxiously:

"Javogues, Javogues!"

Almost immediately she recoiled, bounding to her feet, her hands to her temples, staring aghast, while the cry was torn from her heart:

"He's dead!"

With a scream she rushed past them out of the room, and fled down-stairs. Dossonville, approaching the bed, looked down upon the body that was Javogues's. He looked and looked, forgetting all else, until Sans-Chagrin impatiently touched his arm. Then, with a start, he came to himself and led the way from the empty room.

XI

NICOLE FORGOES THE SACRIFICE

The Maison Talaru, where Dossonville presented himself the next day, was the strangest of all the strange prisons improvised to suit the needs of the Revolution. Crowded with aristocrats, it remained unmolested, thanks to the enormous sums its lodgers paid for their security. In return, the inmates passed the time in agreeable intercourse, gambling, amusing themselves, and eating well. Schmidt, the jailer, not without a touch of humor, replaced the enormous dogs which attended his confrères by a peaceable lamb, whose neck and feet, decorated with pink bows, never failed to reassure the new arrivals.

Placed in his lucrative position by the aid of Dossonville, Schmidt had nothing to refuse his protector; but, as he was at bottom avaricious, he met him with an anxious query as to the probable duration of Nicole's stay.

"What difference can that make to you?" Dossonville replied.

"The fact is, citoyen," Schmidt began cautiously, "the citoyenne has a room to herself, at your request, which brings me in eighteen livres a day, which makes five hundred and forty livres a month, which makes six thousand six hundred livres a year. It's a good sum."

"Mordieu! what gratitude you must bear me, my friend!"

"Yes, yes!" the jailer hastened to say, but with a doubtful inflection. "The ci-devant Marquis of Talaru has only a little office, and he pays that price."

"But he is the proprietor, I thought?"

"He rented the place to the section for six thousand six hundred livres."

"The price you charge him?"

"Yes."

"Good! So he pays you back, for the privilege of remaining a prisoner in his own home, the amount of your rent. Excellent! And they say we republicans are lacking in wit! As for you, citoyen, reassure yourself; the Citoyenne Nicole is here but temporarily."

"Eh, she can stay as long as she wants," Schmidt said hastily, with an eye to future patronage. "I only wanted you to know that I have gratitude."

"And its extent," Dossonville replied with a smile. "Lead the way with your lamb. Did the citoyenne remain quiet? Did she eat anything?"

"A nothing--a sip and a nibble."

Somewhat apprehensive at this symptom, Dossonville approached her room and entered with a hearty "Well, and how goes it?"

Nicole, still exalted and intense, without replying, came forward, questioning him with a glance.

"Reassure yourself, Nicole; everything is for the best," he said. Then, unable to meet the persistent search of her eyes, he admitted grudgingly: "Javogues is dead."

She inclined her head.

"When you kill a man, you know it. There is an intuition. What do they say of me?"

"Everything turned out miraculously," Dossonville answered joyfully. "My men were on guard. No one entered. Javogues did not betray you. The belief is that you stabbed him to save yourself." Without noticing the revolt in her eyes, he continued eagerly: "You are in no danger. I have routed the Tapedures for the present. In a week I'll transfer you to the Madelonnettes, where I have Barabant safely tucked away. There you can wait until the tide sets against the Terrorists, and--"

He stopped, perceiving his blunder, while Nicole, smiling a little at his confusion, said:

"Why do you stop?"

As he began again lamely, she interrupted:

"No, Dossonville, you see as well as I that it cannot be. Why does every one wish to save me?"

"I do not understand."

"Yes, Dossonville, you do, and you see your mistake. You would make me out a murderess. I am not a murderess. I gave my life to the Nation in exchange for Javogues's. I killed him to save Barabant, to save a hundred others who would perish if he had lived. As a patriot, I killed him to deliver the Nation of a monster. Only my life can justify the deed. Don't you see?" She took his hands in hers, saying: "Dear friend, bring me before the tribunal and I will bless you."

"And Barabant?" Dossonville said desperately.

She shook her head. In her present exaltation all that seemed like another life which she had renounced for martyrdom.

"And Barabant?" repeated Dossonville.

"Tell him I did it to save him. He will venerate my memory." She added slowly: "Then I will hold a place in his heart that no woman can ever take. That will be for the best."

"Nicole, listen to me," cried Dossonville. "Listen, for what I say is true. Denounce yourself, and you will drag Barabant to his death. Once admit your reasons for killing Javogues, and Barabant dies as your accomplice."

"Oh, oh!"

Recoiling before this immense, inexorable obstacle to her purpose, Nicole fell to her knees, imploring him with her hands:

"No, no, Dossonville, you are telling me that to save me."

"Yes, to save you; but it is true. Decide for yourself, but your confession sends to the guillotine every friend you have!"

"Dossonville! Dossonville! You are plunging a dagger into my heart!"

"Listen, Nicole; I swear to you it is the truth," he said, raising her from the floor to a chair. "Denounce yourself now, nothing can save him. I say no more; decide for yourself."

Leaving her limp with despair, he departed, well satisfied that the leaven would work and that time and reflection would temper her resolve.

* * * * *

The next day, instead of returning, Dossonville sought out Barabant, obtaining from the frantic lover a letter to Nicole, which he had delivered by the medium of Schmidt. Each day, ignoring the demands the girl sent him by the jailer, Dossonville repeated the same tactics, confident in the power of lovers' logic to sway her finally.

One misfortune disturbed his triumph. On the day following Javogues's death, Louison informed him of the execution of Goursac. Dossonville, who from his fruitless efforts to save the Girondin had retained a deep sentiment of admiration for him, was much affected by the news, and yielding to his anger, scoured the city for traces of the three Tapedures. But despite the most diligent search in café, market, and boulevard, not a sign nor an echo could he find of the former despots.

On the ninth day of Nicole's imprisonment, Schmidt handed him a word from the girl, promising to reason over the decision. But Dossonville, though encouraged, divined that she would meet him with fresh arguments, and absented himself, until at the end of a week he received a second message:

"I renounce. Come."

Then, satisfied, he mounted to her room, grumbling to himself:

"Mordieu! one can't talk forever of dying when one is young and is loved!"

To his alarm, she received him without protestations, while her eyes, as they regarded him sadly, conceded the victory, but reproached him for the means.

"I must see him," she said simply. "Take me to him."

"What then?" Dossonville questioned, suspicious of her calm.

"I will do nothing to endanger his life."

"It is a promise?"

"I promise to do nothing that will endanger his life," she repeated carefully.

"She is still determined to sacrifice herself," he thought. "Mordieu! what an idea! Barabant will make her forget."

That night, toward eleven, he conducted the girl to Les Madelonnettes and restored her to Barabant. Only the lantern of the jailer lighted the sleeping halls as Nicole, with a cry, flew to her lover's arms. In their happiness they forgot their protector; but Dossonville, well content, withdrew, drawing after him the guard.

"You seem different," Barabant said at last. "What is it?"

"I have been away from you."

"How could you think of sacrificing yourself?" he said reproachfully.

"I was away from you," she repeated.

"You are here as my wife," he whispered. "Citoyenne Barabant, you understand?"

"Yes."

"But what is the matter? Why do you cry?"

"It is from joy," she said.

* * * * *

Then for the two prisoners began that weary cycle of the prisons, days so incredible that even those who survived looked back to them, doubting their memory. Everything became monotonous; scenes of heart-rending grief, partings of mothers and children, husbands torn from their wives, the experience of every day cloyed in the lassitude that came from too much suffering. Toward six in the afternoon they assembled in the main halls, listening at first with faltering courage, and then with indifference, to the turnkey reading the list of those summoned to the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

The accused passed out, sullen, resigned, hoping, trusting to a straw, indifferent, tired, and their names were heard no more until the following day, when a turnkey, with brutal exultation, read the list of those who had perished on the guillotine.

A shriek, a sob, a curse, perhaps, would be heard, a sudden converging where a woman had fallen unconscious; but the rest stolidly, dully, counted the hours to the next summons. New arrivals, the daily papers, an occasional letter, brought them news of the fantastic, heaving outer world. It was Frimaire, with tales of the drownings at Nantes--republican marriages, where man and woman, tied together, were thrown into the river with brutal jests; Ventose, with its incredible news that Hébert, the savage Père Duchesne, and the bull-dogs of the Terror had fallen; Germinal, more amazing than all--Danton the lion and Camille Desmoulins, beloved of all, swept into the common fate. And all the time the prisons were bursting with suspects arriving by hundreds from the sections, faster than the guillotine could serve them.

In Nivôse the names of the Citoyen and Citoyenne Barabant were called, and hand in hand, without a word, they presented themselves. They entered the rolling chariot, seeing again the unfamiliar streets; but it was not to trial that they were borne, but to another prison, the Bénédictins Anglais. In Germinal they were again called, and once more expecting death, were again transferred, this time to the Prison des Quatre Nations, with a glimpse of the sun on the warm waters of the swollen Seine and the breath of the spring that, as in mockery, brought to their laps a shower of petals from the flowering trees. Twice again transferred, they passed through the Hôtel des Fermes and arrived in Fructidor at Les Carmes.

Here new tortures awaited them from the hands of their captors, clamoring for measures that would empty the prisons of this constantly swelling horde of suspects. First, the newspaper was forbidden them, then all communication with the outside world. On pretext that the aristocrats were tempting the guards by bribery, a search was instituted and all money and valuables were seized. Later, another search was ordered, and all knives, forks, razors, and pins were confiscated, until for a woman to keep a hair-pin exposed her to immediate trial.

These tyrannical measures, designed to provoke complaint, failing of their purpose, the jailers had recourse to petty tyranny, to insults and jibes. Families were separated that they might feel the force of punishment due their crimes. Miniatures of loved ones were snatched from their throats, with the brutal declaration that traitors had no right to consolation. The vilest bread, spoiled meat, decayed herring, were put before them, and when still no complaint was heard the turnkey, nonplussed and furious, exclaimed:

"Damned aristocrats! What, we feed you garbage and you won't complain!"

Of the two, Barabant, tired of the long suspense, no longer retained any desire to struggle. Nicole alone upheld his resolution, encouraging, inspiring, invigorating him with her indomitable gaiety.

In the long months, she had gone resolutely and without subterfuge over the problem of their relations. At first, in the new flush of happiness at again possessing him, she had yielded weakly, and, banishing from her mind the inexorable figure of Javogues, she had turned to life and hope. In the ascendancy that her courage took over the limp resolution of Barabant she felt in herself a new power, and in him a new need for her, that tempted her with the bright vision of marriage.

As she began to reason the mood passed. For the first time she saw him in the company of men of intelligence and education, with whom he discoursed on things that were to her a closed book. Then she realized that between Barabant and herself was a gulf of opportunity and interests which she could never bridge. He too, she soon realized, felt insensibly the distance between them: she passed for his wife, but the constant reiteration never suggested to him what it brought to her. To become his wife was to be a drag to his future; to remain as they were was to count the hours of her youth. So, vaguely, in a confused intuition, the girl, struggling to understand what was barred to her, grew to realize the limitations to her life. It was a tragedy whichever way she sought, but the tragedy had begun at the first breath of love that had awakened her. So renouncing the future, she returned to the thought of sacrifice,--to save Barabant and, appeasing the _manes_ of Javogues, to dwell in her lover's heart a bright memory of youth and devotion, that would abide with him through life. Therein she took her courage and all her consolation.

With the arrival of Thermidor, the Terrorists, checked by the passive attitude of the prisoners, introduced, as suspects among the prisons, spies, who, succeeding by malignant imagination where brutality had failed, denounced to the Committee of Safety a conspiracy by which the prisoners were to escape by ropes from the windows, overpower the guards, and assassinate the Convention.

The pretext was found sufficient and elastic, and the hecatombs began. The spies, called _moutons_, prepared the lists each night that sent troops of twenty-five or more each day into the fatal chariots,--paralytics, men of seventy, feeble women and maidens,--the crimes of all comprised under the heading of intention to assassinate the Convention. As fast as the prisons were emptied the influx arrived, forcing more transfers.

On the 7th of Thermidor, for the fifth time, Nicole and Barabant were placed in the chariots, to be conveyed to another prison. Then Barabant, utterly tired, rebelled and said:

"At last it is too much. I want to end it. I can endure it no longer. Nicole, let me die now and be through with the suspense. We cannot escape. They are guillotining fifty a day. Next month it will be a hundred. Let us be firm and not await another month of torture."

"Then, Barabant, after all I have done," she said reproachfully, "you would send me to the guillotine?"

"You?"

"I follow where you go."

But their companions cried in alarm: "What are you doing?"

"You'll betray us all!"

"For mercy's sake, be silent!"

Barabant, without energy to pursue long any determination, resigned himself wearily to their protests and the appeal of Nicole.

The chariot rolled out into the streets, where the passers-by, weighted down with the prevailing depression, regarded them without hatred and without curiosity. Their journey led them by the gardens of the Luxembourg, resplendent with green and the glisten of cool fountains. In the chariot some one said:

"Pleasant weather!"

"What good does that do us?" grumbled another.

"I played there as a youngster; but what of that?"

"It does not seem different. How curious!"

"Where are we going?"

"To the Porte-Libre."

"I was there in Prairial."

"What's it like?"

"The same as the rest."

The whispered comments ceased as the prison loomed over them. The carts ground on the cobblestones, passing the gate. From somewhere among them a sigh was heard. A voice said, with a low laugh:

"Here's the inn. All down!"

They passed to the office for identification and enrolment, and on through a square into the strange corridor to the hall, where a score of inmates straggled in curiously to see if they recognized any of the new arrivals. There, to her despair, Nicole beheld, in the shadow of a pillar, screened a little from the crowd, the face she had dreaded for months to encounter--the malignant face of Cramoisin, the Tapedure.

XII

THE FATHER OF LOUISON

The turbulent months which devastated the city with the fury of a pest had been to Dossonville an exhilaration. Paths beset with a hundred pitfalls he ran with enjoyment, passing from side to side with agility and alacrity, reveling in intrigues, nourished by entanglements. But the recrudescence of the Terror alarmed him in one way, for it rendered him powerless to aid Barabant and Nicole. He still watched over them, but even he dared not risk a communication, for the moment had arrived when it sufficed no longer to be Jacobin or Moderate. To sleep securely at home one must have been born lucky.

The death of Javogues and the disappearance of Cramoisin, Boudgoust, and Jambony had left the domination of Dossonville undisputed. Geneviève alone remained; but the girl, violently cast into womanhood by the spark of love, had relapsed into childhood. He saw her once or twice struggling under the weight of a bucket of water,--a child again opening its uncomprehending eyes on the world.

Thus left to the liberty of his own pursuits, Dossonville had passed the time running the streets, nose in the wind, smelling out the popular favor, prying, laughing, never abandoning his equanimity, furious and frantic when it was necessary, moderate and smooth of speech when clemency was in the air.

So that the prudent, desiring no more than to agree with the strong, had trimmed their sails by the conduct of Le Corbeau and Sans-Chagrin, who reflected the mood of their inscrutable leader. In Nivôse, when a wave of pity swept over the Convention, nothing could have been more touching than the laments of Sans-Chagrin, while the glance of Le Corbeau was benevolence itself. Their weapons disappeared, replaced by boutonnières, while, lingering behind their leader, they jested with all comers.

With the news of the wholesale drownings at Nantes and the revival of massacres, the two had put forth cutlasses and pistols as a chestnut blossoms overnight, and, stalking abroad with violent gestures and furious speech, struck dismay in all who met their suspicious glances.

But the leader who, with a sign, worked these sudden transformations was always at the head, imperturbable, alert, and impudent, twirling as his only weapon the little ivory wand with which he whipped circles in the air.

Occasionally he saw Louison, when the execution of a Mme. Du Barry or a Maillard drew him to the spectacle of the guillotine. Between the singular girl and himself there developed a curious attraction and repulsion, which impelled or checked his interest as regularly as the ebb and flow of the tides. When he saw her on the boulevards he felt strongly her magnetism, but in the vicinity of the guillotine she caused him a cold, almost repulsive, sensation.

So marked were her habits that a few had even bestowed on her the soubriquet of "the daughter of the guillotine." At the Cabaret de la Guillotine, where at lunch the menu bore the list of those to be executed in the afternoon, she was pointed out as the one who had never missed a performance. When discussions arose as to an execution, it was always Louison who was appealed to to decide.

This development astounded Dossonville, then annoyed him, and finally aroused him to such a pitch of disgust that one day he broke out:

"Louison, it is not right, nor human, nor decent to give way to such a curiosity. You must stop it. It is dangerous. It will become a mania. Already you seem at times inhuman."

"Others are there every day," she protested.

"But not like you. You must stop. What, does it please you to be called the daughter of the guillotine?"

"I don't know. It is always pleasant to be known."

"It is repellent."

"Don't come, then."

For a fortnight he absented himself, angry and disturbed. But in measure as she ceased to appeal to his interest she perplexed his curiosity, and he was impelled more and more to study her, seeking to understand the reasons of her indifference to suffering and the evident absence of emotion. At the end of two weeks, she met him on the boulevards with an amused smile.

"Since you persist in regarding me as a curiosity," she said, "you might try what you can discover. Mama is back."

Dossonville, without waiting to be urged twice, made a trip to the shop of the wig-maker and discovered that la Mère Baudrier had indeed returned from the provinces. So that night, toward eleven o'clock, he led his watch-dogs back, relying on a plan of campaign which he had imagined to force a revelation. Stationing Sans-Chagrin at the door, under which showed a slit of light, he knocked and entered without awaiting permission.

A woman, shading a candle, came precipitately down the stairs, crying:

"Who's there, and what do you want?"

"Are you la Mère Baudrier?"

"Well?"

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"Descend; I wish to speak with you."

She came down slowly, regarding him with alarmed surprise.

"Who are you?"

"The Citoyen Dossonville. I represent the Nation."

Then, while the look changed to one of dismay, she blurted:

"But what has the Nation to do with me?"

"Do not fear, citoyenne, you will have every chance to excuse yourself."

"Then I am to be arrested?"

Dossonville, without replying, said:

"Lead the way to the back; I must speak with you alone."

She obeyed, repeating:

"Am I under arrest? Am I? There's some mistake. I'm the Citoyenne Baudrier. Of what can I be accused?"

"Exactly on that point I am to interrogate you. It may be long; sit down."

La Mère Baudrier, trembling, took a chair, never ceasing her mumbling.

"But what? I don't understand. Why, every one will tell you that I am a patriot."

Dossonville, who had been a moment interested in the resemblance of daughter and mother, seized upon the last word.

"Citoyenne, there's the point: what constitutes a patriot? Do you know the law of suspects?" He tilted back his head and closed his eyes, not so tightly though as to miss the expression of her face. "These are declared suspects:

"All aristocrats.

"All priests.

"All Moderates.

"All those who, although they have done nothing against the Nation, have done nothing for it."

He examined the prisoner carefully as he continued, emphasizing each word:

"All those who correspond with the enemies of the country.

"All who habitually entertain strangers.

"All those who in the past have been associated with the aristocrats, whether as servant, mistress, or friend."

"She does not seem to fear the word aristocrat," Dossonville added to himself. Then aloud: "Citoyenne Baudrier, you are accused of favoring the aristocrats."

A look of amazement overspread the woman's features, which was so complete an answer to the charge that he added quickly:

"Citoyenne, you are said to have been very intimate in the past with the ci-devant nobles."

The blank look of astonishment gave place to one of indignation.

"I? I, the Citoyenne Baudrier? Come, that's a joke!"

"Citoyenne Baudrier, listen to me," Dossonville said, checking the explosion, "you are accused of having a daughter whose parentage you will not reveal, because the father is a ci-devant aristocrat and an enemy of his country."

At this point-blank accusation, to his surprise, she rose and said scornfully, with her hands on her hips:

"Ah, I see this is a trick of Louison's."

For answer he displayed the shield of an agent de sûreté. La Mère Baudrier, overwhelmed, fell back, covering her face with her hands, while a single word escaped her:

"Never!"

"Citoyenne," Dossonville cried sternly, "I warn you that only by proving the parentage of your daughter can you clear yourself. If you refuse, you must answer before the Tribunal to the accusation."

The woman shook her head without looking up.

"Le Corbeau! Sans-Chagrin!" he called.

At the noise of their entrance into the hall she sprang up, crying: "Wait! Wait!"

Giving them an order to halt, Dossonville returned, saying roughly:

"Well, have you decided to speak?"

For a moment the woman remained swaying, babbling to herself; then suddenly she sank back, crying:

"No, no!"

"Undoubtedly it is an aristocrat, and some one formidable," Dossonville thought, seeing the pallor of her face. Then, raising his voice, he called his men.

At their entrance a trembling seized the body of the woman, but at the sight of the mocking face of Sans-Chagrin she recoiled as before a vision, and a scream escaped her.

"The Curé Sans-Souci! The Curé Sans-Souci!"

"Who calls me by that name?" Sans-Chagrin cried, his face assuming a look of amazement. "Tiens! but I know that woman!"

Suddenly he struck his head.

"Of course!" he cried. "Pardi! what is there so terrible about me? I was always a good friend to you, La Glorieuse."

"You knew it, then, all the while?" the woman cried, turning fiercely to Dossonville.

"I know nothing," Dossonville answered; and seeing that chance had come in somehow to his aid, he demanded curtly of Sans-Chagrin: "What do you know of her?"

"A good deal," Sans-Chagrin began, with a smile. "I confessed her when I was a ci-devant curé in the days of fanaticism and error."

La Mère Baudrier, very white, extended her hand for permission to Dossonville, who said encouragingly:

"Allons, you are going to be reasonable now?"

"I will speak." She turned to Sans-Chagrin. "Citoyen Sans-Souci--"

"I am Sans-Chagrin now."

"Citoyen Sans-Chagrin, they accuse me of having a daughter by an aristocrat--Louison, the bouquetière."

"But your little one was called Rose."

"I changed the name afterward." For a moment she was thrown into confusion, but rallying, she continued: "You can say if the father was an aristocrat."

"I should hope so: it was I that baptized her. Come, now, what was he called? La Gloire--la, le--no, Lajoie, Simon Lajoie, that's it."

"Simon Lajoie!"

The thunderclap was Dossonville's, who, thrown off his guard, caught Sans-Chagrin by the shoulder, repeating:

"Simon Lajoie!"

But immediately, by a violent effort, he controlled himself, and dismissing them hurriedly, turned his back on the frightened woman, seeking to regain his composure. When he turned, it was with the calm of intense excitement.

"Is that the Simon Lajoie who used to frequent the Café Procopé?"

The woman remained dumb.

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"Good. Your explanations are sufficient. You are released."

He watched the look of immense relief that spread over her countenance as she rose, with a mumbled thanks, and started for the door.

"By the way, citoyenne," he cried carelessly; "one moment. Come back. Sit down. Could the Citoyen Lajoie have been any one in disguise?"

Terrified and trapped, the woman sprang up.

"For instance, the good Citoyen Charles Sanson?"

Her answer was a shriek and the thud of her body falling in a swoon to the floor.

XIII

DAUGHTER OF THE GUILLOTINE

"Certainly, he is demented," Le Corbeau cried when, after a dozen zigzags, Dossonville continued to plunge furiously ahead up street after street.

"Decidedly so," grumbled Sans-Chagrin. "Here's three times we've passed the Tour St. Jacques."

"What the devil could have happened?"

"You know Lajoie?"

"Why, of course--a little insignificant man."

"It was perhaps his brother."

"He hadn't the look."

"Anyhow, I say it's time to rest."

"My legs are worn out."

"If we suggested a halt?"

"I don't dare."

"Neither do I."

Oblivious to their fatigue, Dossonville wandered on in absurd circles, heedless of his surroundings, while if he passed a corner three times he did not notice it once. Vain and proud in his imperturbability, for the first time he was completely unnerved by this vision of the executioner that rose up at the side of the girl whom he had been on the verge of loving. All at once the mystery of her character was revealed, the insensibility to suffering, the unnatural curiosity, and the sang-froid beyond a woman.

"What an inheritance! What a curse!" he repeated.

Under the broken silhouettes of the housetops across the luminous sky, from out the mysterious, vague corners of the night, there started up, more ghostly and more sinister, the shadowy dynasty of the Sansons, the pariahs accursed, isolated, loathed, flinging themselves in vain against the barriers of prejudice, striving to escape into the obscurity of their fellows, always discovered, always driven back on the fingers of the crowd, that shrank away even as it pursued.

Back of the furtive figure of Sanson appeared the troop of malign ancestors, masked in scarlet or in black, nonchalant in their blood service, while behind hovered the red cloud of victims,--men, women, priests, nuns, children and gray-heads,--in long danse macabre around the ax, the gallows, and the guillotine; and among the Sansons, he saw, calm and uncomprehending, the figure of Louison.

Suddenly above his head rose the twin shafts of the guillotine, dominating the desert of the night. Then trembling, aghast at this sinister menace, Dossonville, with a cry of horror, turned and fled from the inanimate thing that waited there relentlessly the coming of the day.

* * * * *

In the first recoil from his personal association, he had promised himself never again to encounter Louison; but with the morning she seemed so expelled from his past that, yielding to an overpowering desire to study her in the light of his new knowledge, he drifted, almost unconsciously, to the Place de la Revolution.

The crowd in which he sheltered himself was loose, not very attentive, nor very large: the spectacle was old; there was not enough variety in the performers. In front, scores of women, seated indolently on their chairs, suspended their knitting at each fall of the ax, counting:

"Twenty."

"Twenty-one."

At each execution a murmur wandered through the crowd--a conventional, listless, slurred cry:

"Vive la Nation!"

Louison, never still, moved among the tricoteuses, nodding and chatting. As each hum announced the arrival of a victim on the scaffold she turned for a momentary, prying glance; then, without interest, wheeling about, she cried her cockades, seeking in the crowd a likely customer.

Absorbed in the girl, marveling at the strange and terrible forces that drew her back to the parent scaffold, Dossonville fell into so deep an abstraction that it cost him his concealment. Before he could retire with the departing crowd, Louison, perceiving him, had hastened to his side.

"What happened last night?" she said, with an imperious gesture. "What did you say to my mother?"

"How do you know I saw her?" he said, unable to control a slight movement of recoil.

"I know it. What happened?" she demanded impatiently. "I was there this morning, but she was gone--gone during the night. What passed between you?"

"You have been misinformed."

"Dossonville, you are deceiving me," she said, looking in his face. "You saw her, and you learned the name of my father."

Without allowing time for denial, she took his arm and led him toward the Cours la Reine, turning among the bypaths of the luxuriant woods. There, amid the joyous gaiety of the spring, under the soft foliage of the chestnuts, she faced him with a peremptory question:

"You saw her?"

"No."

"She told you?"

"No."

Louison examined his face attentively.

"What is the matter with you to-day, and why do you conceal it from me? Did you not promise to tell me?"

"Yes."

"Then?"

"Nothing has happened."

"Dossonville, you are lying lamely," she said; then she added, with a frown: "My father was a great scoundrel, then?"

Dossonville did not reply.

"How stupid you are! You think it would make a difference. How does it affect me? Come, I am not responsible, no matter who it is. Tell me. It cannot affect me."

"It will."

"Then you know," she said instantly.

Dossonville shrugged his shoulders. He desired the appearance of resistance more than to resist, for his curiosity was stronger than his pity. But having thus betrayed himself, he added impressively:

"Do not force me to tell you."

She began to laugh.

"Louison, I warn you, do not demand to know."

"I do demand it. I insist."

"You will curse me."

"No."

"I cannot tell you."

"Who is it?" she cried, with a laugh. "Philippe Egalité, a farmer-general, Bailly, Capet even,--I mention the worst."

"Louison," he said shortly, "they call you the daughter of the guillotine."

She stopped, perplexed.

"You are well named."

"Don't return to that," she said irritably. "It was agreed we were not to mention that. Come, don't keep me waiting. I tell you it will make no difference."

"You absolve me?"

"Of course."

"Even if Sanson were your father?"

Louison burst out laughing, but suddenly she broke off at the sight of his face.

"Is that serious?"

"Yes."

She repeated, "Is that serious?"

"Yes."

"I am the daughter of Sanson?"

Dossonville inclined his head, awaiting the explosion. To his surprise, she remained quiet, withdrawing a little, while her eyes still waited on him, as though expecting a denial.

"How curious!" she said at length. "I never thought of that. Ah, I understand why she hid it. Now tell me all."

Seeing that she did not realize the extent of the revelation, Dossonville quickly related the facts, astonished at her calm, wondering what force was working beneath the surface.

Louison, in fact, unable immediately to comprehend the situation, continued to watch Dossonville, as though to estimate from his behavior the force of the change to her. Remembering his attempted escape on the Place de la Revolution, and alarmed at a new reserve in his manner, she asked herself angrily, albeit anxiously, what difference the knowledge would make in him. To test him, she advanced a step and said, holding out her arms as though to embrace him:

"Thanks, my friend; you have kept your promise."

He withdrew but a step and only for an instant, but that involuntary shrinking was her sentence.

With a cry of despair, she bounded back, transformed with hot, revolting anger, her fingers struggling against the temptation of the dagger, crying to him:

"Go! Go quickly! Go now!"

Then, distrusting the murder in her heart, she fled into the woods; but in a moment, crazed with the cruel injustice of her fate, she came running back, her lips trembling with passion, her breath cut and quick. With his accustomed prudence, Dossonville had retired by another direction, leaving Louison to tire herself out among the fragrant paths in fruitless, maddened rushings.

* * * * *

Gradually among the tricoteuses, the bouquetières, and the clientèle of the Cabaret de la Guillotine it began to be whispered that something extraordinary had happened to Louison. Her manner had changed. She was no longer indifferent, mocking, and careless under the scaffold. Instead, her companions began to be alarmed at the cloud on her brow, the brooding fixity of her glance, the abruptness and the poverty of her speech. Her questions were even stranger than her moods. One day she asked of her companion, thrusting her hand toward the guillotine:

"Does that affect you to see them die like that?"

"I dream sometimes at nights," the girl answered.

Then Louison, turning on her an uncomprehending glance, exclaimed:

"True?"

Another time she said:

"Doesn't that make you curious?"

"Of what?"

"Curious to know what you would do."

Those who repeated her remarks exclaimed in apprehension and tapped their foreheads. As a natural consequence, the most extraordinary rumors arose. One declared that she had been seen thrice at midnight prowling about the vicinity of the scaffold. Another affirmed that he on whom she looked with anger would perish. Others, scorning these absurd rumors, gave it as their opinion that her mind was shaken by her unnatural obsession. The girl did not fail to notice the change in the demeanor of her companions, and, in her tortured imagination, ascribed to it a different cause.

"Why do they draw away from me?" she said once.

"It's your imagination."

"Are you superstitious?" she said disjointedly.

"I? A little."

"Why do they call me the daughter of the guillotine? Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

And she threw upon her companion a quick, cunning glance, as though to surprise the momentary confusion that would expose her real knowledge.

Thermidor began with the hecatombs from the pretended Conspiracy of the Prisons, and the transfer of the guillotine to the Barrière du Trône Renversé. The great rolling biers, attended by the scum of the city, bore each day to the scaffold their thirty, forty, sixty victims. Even the Faubourg St. Antoine, satiated and appalled, began to grumble, while from time to time voices broke out in protestation, willing from mere lassitude to end the spectacle by their own sacrifice.

On the 6th of Thermidor, almost at the side of Louison, a bouquetière, her comrade, cried out:

"I am sick of it! Robespierre is a scoundrel. They kill too many people. I want to die."

The next day she was on the scaffold, looking down indifferently, contented to end the fatigue of surfeited disgust.

Louison laughed aloud.

"Why do you laugh?" her neighbor said. "What has she done to you?"

"I do not laugh at her," she answered impatiently. "I laughed because I told her I would go first."

Her companion edged away. The tricoteuses, stopping their needles, counted:

"Forty-eight!"

At that moment Louison beheld Dossonville on the outskirts of the crowd. Seizing the girl nearest to her, a child of fifteen, by the shoulder, she cried, with a furious gesture:

"Jeanneton, do you see that fellow over there? He thinks I can't see him, the fool! As though I cared!"

The child struggled to free herself, but Louison, without relaxing her hold, transferred her look to the scaffold. Twice again the murmur rose:

"Forty-nine!"

"Fifty!"

"Do you know what I am wondering?" Louison said suddenly to the child whimpering in her clutch. "How strange it must feel to be there."

All at once, releasing the frightened Jeanneton, she advanced toward the guillotine, as though irresistibly sucked into the maelstrom, stopped, drew her hand across her forehead, then, facing the crowd, flung away her basket of flowers and shouted:

"Vive le Roi!"

In an instant she was surrounded, while everywhere the cries went up:

"She is mad!"

"She is drunk!"

"We have seen it for weeks."

"She is not responsible."

"She is a patriot."

Others insisted:

"Arrest her!"

"The Nation is insulted!"

"No favor!"

About the fringes of the crowd they questioned excitedly, running to and fro:

"Who is it?"

"Louison."

"Impossible!"

"Yes, Louison."

"She is mad!"

About her the mass struggled and swayed, some crying to her to simulate drunkenness, others clamoring for her arrest. In the center, Louison, alone calm and indifferent, secure in the knowledge of what must follow, continued to regard the silhouette of the guillotine, while about her lips was that curious smile which is seen only on the face of the martyr or the insane.

XIV

THE LAST ON THE LIST

As Nicole, in the hall of the Porte-Libre, stopped aghast at this apparition of their enemy, Cramoisin perceived her, and scuttling hurriedly forward, cried in triumph:

"Bonjour, Nicole. What luck, eh? Well, aren't you going to say good day?"

"Bonjour," she answered hastily.

"And Barabant, too," he cried. "Better still, and so glad to see me! Bonjour, Barabant."

"Ah, it's you, hypocrite!" Barabant answered scornfully.

There was a movement of incredulity and alarm among the prisoners, who hastened to withdraw from them. Cramoisin, as though whipped across the face, fell back, scowling and cursing, while Nicole, seizing Barabant's arm, cried:

"Barabant, what have you done?"

"Nicole," he answered, "do you remember what Goursac said when they arrested him?"

"No."

"'They are liberating me.' Well, I too wish to be free. I have lived like a dog for months. That is ended. I will not cringe before this bully, who will send us to-morrow to the guillotine."

"Then you are determined to die?"

"Yes."

"So be it."

They took their places at the long table, huddling among the famished and the fever-racked, while the scullions brought in pails the revolting food. Anxious to learn the position of Cramoisin, Nicole was about to question her neighbor, an abbé whose kindly look encouraged her, when Cramoisin, suddenly appearing at her shoulder, exclaimed:

"Eh, Nicole, my dear, if you want to know what I am doing here, ask me. I'll tell you. I am the secretary of the Conspiration. I keep a list of all the good conspirators and I see that they are rewarded. I bring good luck. I've been here but a week and we've guillotined forty!"

"You know him?" the priest asked as the bully swaggered down the line, and Nicole perceived the slight movement with which he drew away.

"He is our bitterest enemy."

"Pardon," he murmured, regarding her with compassion.

"We expect death," she answered quietly.

"What he says is true," he added in a whisper. "Since he has been here they have taken forty of us. He makes out the lists every night. We live at his pleasure."

"Does he live among us?" she asked, with a quickened interest.

Again Cramoisin returned, strutting with bombastic gestures, crying to the room:

"I am the friend of Fouquier. Fouquier promised me to-day that in two more weeks we could put out a sign, 'To let.' Isn't he kind to us, though? He's very sympathetic, is Fouquier. And I am his friend--I, Eugène Franz Cramoisin. He honors me with his confidence. Eat in peace. I'll speak to him about you. Don't worry."

He swaggered on, vaunting his intimacy, loudly assuring them he brought good luck.

Nicole anxiously repeated her question.

"He keeps up the farce of being a prisoner," her neighbor answered.

"Where does he lodge?"

"Near you, where the new arrivals are put."

"Sangdieu!" rose again the voice of Cramoisin, who, farther down, had halted at the side of a woman. "The herring is rotten. Do you not see it? Come, you must complain."

"It is all I need," came the faint answer. "I am not hungry."

"Bah, you aristocrats, you haven't the courage of dogs!" He returned to another: "And you, young man, they treat you badly, eh? Shall I complain to Fouquier?"

The youth, who had imprudently met his eye, instantly dropped his head; but Cramoisin, amid the jeers of the turnkeys, with a pretense of listening for his answer, exclaimed:

"What's that you say? Robespierre is a scoundrel?"

"I said nothing!"

"Then you thought it, and thoughts are offenses!"

Arrived opposite Barabant, he planted himself with folded arms and cried:

"Well, Citoyen Barabant, the food's good, eh?"

Pushing back his plate, Barabant likewise folded his arms and answered with a sneer:

"Do you think so?"

"To me it is delicious!"

"That's not astonishing,--it's the food of swine!"

A murmur rumbled over the hall, rising to weak cries of protests:

"No."

"He slanders it."

"We don't think so, citoyen."

Others implored Barabant to be silent, trembling at his rash speech, that would suffice to empty the prison. Under pretense of upbraiding him, they surrounded him, beseeching him to have a thought of their danger. Yielding to their terror, Barabant remained silent; but when, after the meal, they had dispersed to their rooms, he exclaimed:

"Ah, that did me good! I feel I am a man again. Nicole, to-night I shall sleep soundly for the first time in months, knowing that after to-morrow I may sleep more soundly."

Waiting barely long enough to assure herself of his unconsciousness, Nicole withdrew from his side and stole down the corridor, seeking until she found under a door a slit of light.

At her soft entrance Cramoisin started up in alarm from the desk where he had been preparing his list, and placed the chair between them.

"I am not come to harm you," she said disdainfully. Still for a moment he eyed her in doubt, before he was reassured. He grumbled:

"What do you want?"

From where she was she could see the list, and at its head the one name she dreaded to find.

"Read, if you wish," he said indifferently. "It will give you pleasure."

There were ten names in all, Barabant's being the first, and hers was not of the number.

"I have something to ask of you."

"Ask."

"I do not ask that we be sent to the guillotine together," she said, planning cunningly to avoid one danger. "That would be too great a consolation for you to accord us. Exchange my name for Barabant's."

"Nini," he said, watching her with covetous, blinking eyes. "I don't intend to let you go."

"If you will send me instead," she cried; "if you swear it, swear to spare him, I will give you a secret that will earn you the gratitude of Fouquier."

"You are too pretty," he said, with a smirk; "when one is as pretty as that, one is a patriot."

"You will not accept?"

"What, after this evening?"

"Citoyen," she cried, "he is in a delirium! It was the fever."

"Yes, indeed."

"Citoyen, he admitted to me that it was unjust."

"He shall go. You I'll keep."

"Citoyen Cramoisin," Nicole said coldly, "you can never make me belong to you, if that is your purpose. You are not Javogues, and I killed Javogues. Do you understand?"

Before the fire in her eyes Cramoisin shrank away, mumbling:

"You are more difficult than the women of the aristocrats."

"I give you my secret!" Nicole cried in despair. "Use it for your own good. I did not kill Javogues because he pursued me; I killed him to destroy a tyrant. Place my name there instead of Barabant's, and I will affirm it before the Tribunal. You will have the credit of discovering a plot. Fouquier will reward you."

"Is that your secret?" Cramoisin said contemptuously. "Nothing new in that."

"What! You knew," she cried, "and held back my name?"

"Bah! When one is dead, one is no longer a patriot."

"Citoyen Cramoisin, listen. If you will put my name on the list instead of Barabant's, I'll give you all the money I have."

To her joy, he looked up with a sudden interest.

"How much have you?"

"Twenty livres."

At the mention of this amount, which Nicole had managed to preserve, his eye became eloquent; but suddenly controlling himself, he asked:

"Paper?"

"Gold."

"You have it with you?"

"Yes."

"Let's see it."

"When you agree."

"It is right to be merciful," he said at last, with a sigh. "But I cannot spare him more than one day."

"For a week?" she pleaded.

He shook his head.

"Six days--five?"

"Impossible!"

"Cramoisin, for pity's sake, four?"

"Never, never!"

"Cramoisin, by your hope of salvation!"

"I'll give you three; not another hour."

He stretched out his hand.

"No; erase first."

He took off the name of Barabant and substituted, "The woman Nicole."

"What did you write?"

"The woman Nicole."

"Put the Citoyenne Nicole Barabant."

"What! You are his wife?"

"Put it down."

"There! Give me the money."

"And you will keep Barabant's name until the 10th of Thermidor?" she said solemnly.

"Yes."

"Swear it."

"I swear it."

"On your honor."

"There, on my honor, then! Give me the money."

She gave it to him, and suddenly casting herself on her knees, she cried hysterically:

"Thanks, thanks! You have a heart, I know. You will keep your word. You can pity. You can be merciful. Thanks! Thanks!"

Catching the ugly, cruel hands in hers, she covered them with her kisses and her tears. Then, escaping, she fled down the corridor, returning to bed, but not to sleep.

* * * * *

In the morning Barabant awoke, to find her eyes open and the sunlight in the room.

"How well I slept!" he said, springing up. Going to the window, he spread his hands into the beam of the sun that entered. "That feels good. Tiens, you have a strange look! What is it? You are not afraid?"

"No," she answered, smiling.

"Well, what then?"

"I have something--"

"Why, you're all wrought up," he said, in surprise, as she stopped.

"Barabant, I ask you only because there is no hope of life. Barabant, I--"

"Why, mignonne, what is it? What has happened?"

She threw herself in his arms, sobbing:

"Barabant, I want to be a wife!"

The moments that he held her in stupefaction were moments of agony to her. He put her from him, looking in amazement at the tear-stained face.

"Idiot that I am!" he cried suddenly. "That is what has been tormenting you!"

Waiting only for the accent of his voice, she sprang back, trembling, not daring to look at him.

"Then you will?" she cried, stretching out her hands to him. "Then you will?"

"Of course!"

Into his arms she threw herself, sobbing with the poignant ecstasy of joy, while he listened, still uncomprehending.

"That means so much to you?" he said. "But I always considered you as my wife."

Even in her emotion his simplicity drew from her a smile.

"Since when have you had this idea?"

"From the beginning."

"True?"

"Yes."

"From--"

"From the afternoon of the 10th of August; but I did not realize it then."

The correction summed up all her history.

All at once Barabant, rousing himself from his amazement, said:

"But how are we to be married?"

"Do you remember the abbé next to us?"

"Yes."

"I will ask him."

"Do you think he will do it?" he said doubtfully.

"I know how to convince him."

He kissed her and drew her away from him.

"Shall I go?" she said. "Now?"

"Fly!"

* * * * *

She was away a long time. When she reappeared with the priest she said timidly:

"I have taken very long. I wanted to confess. It did me good. Does that annoy you?"

"No," he said smilingly; and looking at the face of her companion, he said to himself: "She has made him cry."

They joined hands, kneeling before the black-robed figure in the warm room, pervaded with the sunlight that the bars on the window could not arrest. He made them man and wife, and blessed them, and, bending, put out his hands to raise the woman. But almost immediately, with a smile that was of the compassionate master, he ceased his attempts and stole from the room.

* * * * *

"Tell me one thing," Barabant asked.

"What is it?"

"Why did you not ask before?"

"I could not ask. Now it makes no difference."

"But why?"

Again and again, through their solitary afternoon, as they waited, now silent, now questioning each other, he returned to his query without success. At five o'clock, perceiving in her body an involuntary shudder, he said:

"You're not afraid of to-morrow?"

"No. So many others have gone." She had a superstitious idea of God and another world, confused, simple, and sufficient. Thinking of Javogues, she added: "The abbé said I should be saved. Do you believe it?"

"Yes," he answered, respecting her faith. "I shall not fear, either."

"I know," she answered dreamily.

"She does not think of me," he thought. Then wishing to talk of himself, he said:

"It is life that I regret. I ought to have done so much."

"I wanted to give you that," she said at last, feeling in the air the approach of the last hour. "I wanted to die for you. That was my dream. You would have revered my memory and I should have been happy."

"Why do you say that?" he said, frowning. "And what do you mean?"

"I am only an ignorant girl," she said. "I could not long have been your companion."

"You are wrong," he cried vehemently, repeating it several times, "and you do me an injustice."

She yielded, and asked the question that had been on her lips a dozen times:

"Truly, Eugène, you would have married me?"

"Can you doubt it, Nicole?"

"You are good, very good." She smiled, satisfied to bear this promise away with her, but in her heart she was not quite convinced. "You have been very kind."

He was glad at such a moment to own a good action.

"Do you know, it's good to have you," he said slowly, a moment awed by the thought of the morrow. "I do not fear, but I am glad you are to be with me."

"Yes, I know."

All at once she sprang up, trembling from head to foot, crying:

"Do you hear?"

"The bell?"

"It is six."

"What! you are trembling?"

"Kiss me."

She threw herself into his arms, clutching him to her, while he, in bewilderment, said:

"But I don't understand."

"Hold me, Eugène, hold me!" she cried. "Don't let me go!"

She kissed him, holding his head in her hands, and the kiss awakened in him the memory of that first meeting of their lips, in the dark stairway, under the weak torch. He placed his arm about her waist, drawing her gently down the corridor, and believing that her courage at the last had failed her, he whispered as they went:

"Do not fear, little one. I am with you. I'll have courage for us both."

The prisoners assembled in the great hall, listless and dragging their steps, searching among themselves with anxious or mechanical curiosity, seeking to divine the chosen. Soon from the courtyard rumbled the wheels of the arriving cart.

Presently, faint at first, down the distant corridor fell the step of the turnkey, approaching slowly, as though to prolong the cruel suspense. With a crash the gates were flung open, and, flanked by two mastiffs, holding in his hand the fatal roll, the jailer suddenly confronted every eye. Without pause, the monotonous, singing voice opened the long, dreary preamble, finished it, and, rising to a shout, began the list:

"The Citoyenne Nicole Barabant!"

A sigh of relief escaped the girl, and her head fell on the shoulder of Barabant; but her ears, deaf to the cries of sorrow, to the lamentations of mothers and wives, to the screams of astonishment and despair that woke the silent hall, followed anxiously the roll, counting:

"Seven--eight--nine!"

At the tenth she relaxed, and her arms wound about the neck of Barabant in the last long embrace, violent with the pang of parting. Suddenly, with a cry of despair, she tore herself from him,--an eleventh name was being read:

"The Citoyen Eugène--"

Something extraordinary had happened; the jailer had stopped in indecision. Nicole, in the agony of her mind, saw but one face--the mocking face of Cramoisin--against an opposite pillar.

"The Citoyen Eugène Franz Cramoisin!"

The sneer dropped out; the face grew livid. On all sides astounded cries went up:

"Cramoisin?"

"Impossible!"

"Cramoisin arrested!"

Nicole, understanding nothing but that Barabant was saved, hearing only Barabant's voice demanding like a madman to be taken, fell into his arms, crying:

"No, no, it is not a mistake! It is I who have saved you. Barabant! Barabant! It is as I wanted it! Remember me, Barabant! Don't forget me! The abbé will tell you all. Barabant--Barabant!"

They tore her from his arms and swept her away, still stretching out the unavailing fingers, still calling:

"Barabant! Barabant!"

The weeping and the wailing died behind the clashing gates. A woman, catching her in her arms, supported her down the unending corridor, whispering:

"Lean on me. I have no one."

They entered the courtyard and climbed into the chariot, where a few prisoners sadly and indifferently watched their arrival. There presently two turnkeys, laughing boisterously, bore out and dumped beside them the body of Cramoisin, who had fainted.

XV

THE FALL OF THE TERROR

On the 9th of Thermidor Dossonville, who had long foreseen the inevitable conflict of Robespierre and the Convention, resolved on another rapid shift, and, appearing in the Rue Maugout, denounced Robespierre and the Jacobins in such unmeasured terms that he not only sent his listeners galloping off to denounce him, but to his amazement on turning about, found himself deserted even by Sans-Chagrin and Le Corbeau.

According to his custom, he visited the Conciergerie to inspect the prisoners. Already in the streets was the awakening of the great conflict. In the crowds the Jacobins alone raised their voices in furious boasting; but silence predominated, and the silence told of anger and condemnation.

In the first division he found no familiar face among the twenty-odd prisoners until, on the point of turning away, he discovered the abject form of Cramoisin. The downfall of the Terrorists appeared to him as a favorable presage.

He passed to the second division; there the crowd was thicker and more turbulent. Over the uneven field of bobbing heads he saw the judges on the bench, the listless jury, joking among themselves, and the abhorrent figure of Fouquier; while to the right, packed together on the benches, were the score of prisoners who waited, without hope, the mockery of a trial.

Dossonville, taking his place in the stream of those who constantly pressed to the front seeking the face of relative or friend, yielded good-humoredly the right of way to those who sought in sorrow. After some delay he reached the front rank. There a cry was torn from him:

"Oh, mon Dieu!"

At the first glance he had seen Nicole. Drawn by some subtle intelligence, she raised her eyes and saw him.

"What a fatality!" he cried to himself. "She herself has done this!"

A sudden anger filled him, of revolt and resentment against the stubborn sacrifice of this frail girl who had defeated him at the very last. His glance of reproach she met with one of content, which said: "You see, it is as I said."

She smiled seriously, a little sadly, as one who, though not regretting the decision, had not foreseen the cost.

A hand swept him back as others pressed fervently forward. He heard a mother's voice cry at his side:

"They have taken my child, my son."

His glance following dumbly the outstretched hands, he beheld at the side of Nicole the figure of a boy, who searched the crowd with frightened face. The buzz of voices rose about, the mother's mingling with the crowd.

"But it's a mistake. He's sixteen."

"Then don't worry, they can't touch him!"

"Aye, he's safe!"

"They arrested him for his brother, who's twenty-six."

"Calm yourself, la petite mère, any one can see he's a boy."

"They'll release him?"

"Of course--he's under age."

"Aye, any one can see that."

Dossonville but half heard them. He was crushed by the cruel turn of fate that had claimed her at the last, when the morrow would mean life and security. His eyes, yet refusing to believe, had never left Nicole's face. She was pale; but the pallor was of serenity, and gave to her person a certain distinction that seemed to raise her above her class. From time to time a certain pensiveness, whether of melancholy or of regret, gathered in her eyes. She was looking with womanly revolt below her, where, on a litter, exposed to all eyes, lay the unconscious form of a woman. The audience, rebelling against such cruelty, began to murmur:

"Remove her!"

"Take her out!"

"Send her to the hospital!"

The cry was taken up, passing from a murmur in the front ranks to volume and distinctness as it rolled back. The protest became so insistent that several of the jury began to cast anxious glances at the audience, and a judge motioned to Fouquier. There was an expectant lull; but Fouquier cried, with a sneer:

"She'll revive. Call the roll!"

The storm that had subsided in anticipation burst forth anew.

"No! No!"

"Remove her!"

"Justice!"

"Outrage!"

Near Dossonville a blacksmith, with leather apron, was shouting:

"To the hospital!"

A red-haired man in a baker's cap, with clenched fists, added:

"Tyrant!"

Fresh arrivals, bringing tidings of uprisings throughout the city, gave new courage to the protests. Fouquier, impressed at last by the outbursts, rose sullenly and commanded:

"Bear the woman to the witness-room, but the instant she revives bring her back."

The roll-call was begun--the simple attestation of individuality that had replaced the pleas of advocates and the taking of testimony. Encouraged by its first success, the audience began to murmur:

"They say the Quartier St. Antoine is in revolt against Robespierre."

"The Convention will surely declare him under arrest."

"If he falls, the executions will stop."

"I say the trial ought to stop until we see."

"Yes, postpone the trial."

"What! There are traitors, then, in the room!" cried Fouquier, who, the better to see, had mounted a step. Before his threatening glance the movement of clemency died away. Again was heard the monotonous voice of the clerk intoning the roll and the listless responses of the accused. In the stand one of the jury impatiently pulled out a watch, another stifled a yawn.

All at once there was a craning of heads. An interruption had come; the voice of the young boy was protesting:

"Citoyen, the accusation is for my brother. I am not twenty-six. I have done nothing against the Republic. Citoyen, I am sixteen. I have my papers to prove it."

A greffier nodded his head in confirmation, and extended a handful of papers toward the judge, saying:

"Citoyen, he speaks the truth."

Murmurs ran through the crowd:

"It's a mistake!"

"He's a child!"

"Release him!"

On the judges' bench the figure of Dumas arose.

"And if you are only sixteen," he cried brutally, "in the matter of crime you are fully eighty." Then, with a furious gesture, he added: "Pass on, and make haste!"

The murmur of revolt from the audience was overwhelmed in a sudden roar of astonishment. Dumas had been arrested! The counter-revolution had come! Those who had not seen the arrest cried:

"But what has happened?"

"Tell us! Tell us!"

Others answered:

"Dumas!"

"Arrested!"

"The counter-revolution has come!"

A voice cried:

"The quartiers are in arms!"

"True?"

"The tocsin is ringing!"

"They'll make an end of Robespierre?"

"Impossible!"

"It's true! Haven't they arrested Dumas?"

"Suspend the trial!"

"Mercy! Clemency!"

All eyes turned to Fouquier, who answered contemptuously and stubbornly:

"Justice must take its course!"

At Dossonville's side the blacksmith, with the sudden frenzy of prophecy, cried:

"Fouquier, beware! The guillotine is waiting for you!"

While with brawny shoulders he wriggled free of the willing crowd, Dossonville looked for the hundredth time at Nicole. She had not abandoned her calm; only a slight frown told of the havoc the sudden opening and closing of the gates of hope played in her soul.

Another judge replaced Dumas. The roll-call was hurried on. Twice Fouquier sent a physician to report the condition of the woman in the witness-room. A flutter of the eyelids would have meant death. She remained in a stupor, and was at last sent to the hospital. The roll-call ended. The jury, after the farce of declaring that they had heard sufficient evidence, retired to deliberate upon the guilt of the twenty-six. They returned shortly. It was late, and many suffered from the postponement of the luncheon-hour. One man acquitted--Aviot Turot, laborer.

A shudder passed through the body of Dossonville, and a groan escaped his lips. The fatal, inevitable word "Guilty" overwhelmed him. Nicole heard it with a smile--sad, yet satisfied.

Another stir, and a buzz of comments rose as the executioner entered and began to converse with Fouquier. Those in front, who could hear, called back:

"Sanson is remonstrating."

"Sanson wants the execution deferred."

"He says the city is rising."

A last time Fouquier refused to budge, and, crossing his arms, reiterated bluntly, to be heard by all:

"No, no! I say no! Justice must take its course."

The condemned, who had paused as they had risen trembling with hope, filed out, while the crowd in the court-room surged forth to meet the tumbrels.

Dossonville, using his privilege of agent de sûreté, entered the prison, seeking Nicole in the crowd of prisoners massed in the outer hall; threading through anxious groups, who whispered:

"You saw Dumas arrested?"

"They say there is a revolt against Robespierre."

"The people seemed to sympathize with us."

Others, scorning to hang their hopes on desperate chances, waited stoically or reverently the summons to the tumbrels. A young aristocrat was whistling defiantly:

"Oh, Richard, oh, mon roi, L'univers t'abandonne!"

In another group, guarding their enmity to the end, two brothers of the people retorted with the "Marseillaise."

Two women near Dossonville were chatting gaily:

"I am so pale those cursed revolutionists will think that I am afraid."

"You must not give them that satisfaction."

"I do seem pale, then?"

"Yes."

"Ah, then I must rouge!"

Dossonville examined the figure of the graceful woman, who was gaily daubing her cheeks, and recognized the famous Duchess of M----. At this moment, in the obscurity of the arches, he discovered at last the blue dress and golden hair of Nicole.

"Oh, it is you," she cried joyfully. "I had hoped you could see me."

"Nicole," he said bitterly, "this is your doing."

Her manner changed; she grew serious.

"My friend," she said, "I have but done what I wished. I am happy." She held up her finger with Barabant's ring on it. "You see, I am his wife, and I have saved him."

The outward movement toward the tumbrels had begun. From the doorway the guards repeated:

"Hurry up, there; hurry up, you cursed aristocrats!"

Dossonville kissed her with more feeling than he had believed possible, and said, through the tears that clouded his eyes, "I would have saved you."

"Do not grieve," she said, touched by his sorrow. She took her scarf and put it into his hand, saying: "Give it to him. Tell him that I am happy--that it is best so. Adieu!"

Then, as though fearing to lose her self-control, she pressed his hand and hurried away.

Dossonville, passing out by a side entrance, hastened to meet the slow procession across the river. The city was in uproar; over the roofs the bells were crying the civil strife, while every street seemed to give forth the thunder of drums. Masses of volunteers, without formation or leader, swept the boulevards, while the air was charged with the conflict of shouts:

"Vive la Commune!"

"À bas les Jacobins!"

"Vive Robespierre!"

"Robespierre à la Guillotine!"

The chariots crossed from the gates of the Conciergerie, acclaimed by the hoots and jeers of the daily hordes of mad women who gathered to shriek their foul abuse and frantic revilings. But as the tumbrels passed the river the insults ceased, replaced by murmurs of sympathy.

In the third chariot Dossonville found Nicole. The duchess, with her brilliant cheeks, was on the same bench, and between the two women the boy, his hand in Nicole's.

From the direction of the Convention came wild rumors of Robespierre's defeat. The crowd, increasing, began to cry:

"Enough blood!"

"No more blood!"

"Pity on the condemned!"

Dossonville, hardly daring to hope, noticed that Sanson examined the crowd anxiously--a not unfriendly glance. The demonstration continued, growing bolder, a hundred voices insisting:

"Enough blood!"

"No more victims!"

"Stop the massacre!"

Among the prisoners several, unable to resist the sudden leap of hope to their eyes, stretched out their hands, crying:

"We are innocent!"

In the first chariot Cramoisin, in a frenzy, was shouting:

"Citoyens, do not mistake me. I am a republican. Vive la République! Save me, at least!"

Nicole was speaking to the boy; for the new vision of life had made him tremble. Amid the leaping floods of humanity she remained calm, a certain maternal sweetness and repose enveloping her as she sought to fortify the resolution of her companion. To Dossonville, through the rising storm of sound and swaying of bodies, a lull of peace seemed to surround her and to remove her from the frenzy.

Again the revolt rose in him that she should die thus. Perceiving all at once that the crowd had pressed about the carts until their progress was impeded, he flung himself into the swirl, exhorting and encouraging. The cries redoubled, becoming more threatening:

"Save them!"

"Enough butchery!"

"On, comrades! Save them!"

"Aye, deliver them!"

"Stop the chariots!"

"Unhitch the horses! Unhitch the horses!"

At this last, the cry of Dossonville, the multitude, with a shriek of triumph, surged up against the tumbrels. A hundred hands checked the horses, reaching out for the buckles of the harness, while a dozen voices cried:

"Courage! We'll release you!"

Already the prisoners exclaimed joyfully, already Dossonville stretched out his arms to Nicole, when a cry of fear and despair burst from the rescuers, voiced in the dreaded name:

"Henriot! Henriot!"

Up the street, at the head of his dragoons, sabres flashing in the air, break-a-neck came the wild figure of the Jacobin.

The surge of the fleeing crowd held Dossonville a moment against the tumbrel, where he heard through the confusion a cry of despair from the boy, "I could have borne anything but hope!" Then, as Dossonville was swept away, he saw the child's head fall upon the shoulder of Nicole. The next moment he was buffeted and hurled aside; then a horse struck him and flung him to the ground, where a dozen feet trampled him. Stunned, covered with dirt, and bleeding, he stumbled to his feet. The tumbrels, surrounded by cavalry, were disappearing in the distance, moving swiftly. He ran after them, shaking his helpless fist, and as he turned the corner, a groan burst from him. Over the heads of the people the twin shafts of the guillotine sprang into view.

Numb and half unconscious, seeing only, in the third cart, the distant blot of blue, he limped on, following as best he could into the square. He fought his way to the front, beside the cordon of naked swords that girdled the scaffold, repeating to himself a hundred times:

"I must not stay! I will not stay!"

But still the pitiful hope of a deliverance held him there, to snatch at every message of the air that floated over the distracted city. One after another the condemned mounted the steps and passed across the stage like phantoms, hurried on by the remorseless Jacobin, while those about him cried:

"Oh, for two hours--for one!"

"Cursed Henriot, we could have saved them!"

"Why does the Convention delay?"

"Ah, the monster! He is afraid to lose a single one!"

She came at last, a patch of blue, a white face against the stretch of heads. She saw him not at all, nor any one. The maternal instinct of the woman that had raised her above her companions on the journey was gone, and with it all consciousness of the world and the sorrows and the responsibilities which had so transformed her. Only once did she notice her surroundings, when the bourreau, with impatient hand, bared her throat. Then for a moment her hands went instinctively to cover herself from the multitude. Almost immediately her face became grave and reverent. The assistants advanced to take her to the guillotine. Then with a rapid motion she made the sign of the cross, raising her eyes to the deep sky, as though already she saw beyond the grave,--the timid question of a child who hesitates in wonder before the incomprehensible.

With a sob, Dossonville turned, shrinking from the sight of the mutilating knife, and waited with averted face.

There was a vast moment, then a shock of steel, and a woman who had seen his tears whispered:

"It is over!"

Then, fleeing from the inexorable machine, he plunged, weeping, through the crowd, stumbling aimlessly on into the frantic city, where, too late, every street was echoing to the fear-releasing shrieks of rejoicing:

"Robespierre is fallen!"

"The Terror is ended!"

EPILOGUE

An hour later Dossonville was arrested, thanks to his political somersault, which had brought him twenty denunciations before the Committee of Safety as having always spoken ill of the Jacobins and defamed the character of Robespierre. The accusation of a day served to cleanse the record of months.

Imprisoned for a few months at the Maison Talaru, he gained the frontier at a favorable moment and embarked for South America. Then for ten years, at sea or in the colonies, he was buffeted from continent to continent, always embroiled, always running on the lead of adventure, which he called his one bad habit.

When he again saw Paris, the Empire was at its crest. The city he had left a wilderness had flowered with the riotous luxuriance of the tropics. The Tuileries Gardens were again noisy with the laughter of promenaders, thronging to a review in the Place du Carrousel. Wherever he went his eye caught the flash of martial splendor and the sheen of sabers.

A little sadly he spent the days in the strange Babylon, seeking some trace of the great Revolution that once had rolled through the city, of the thundering mobs, the fervid cafés, the tricoteuses, and the creak of the roiling tumbrels.

The Cabaret of the Prêtre Pendu, its gibbet banished, had become the Cabaret of a Hundred and One Victories. The greeting of "citoyen" no longer resounded in the street. Of all the familiar faces in the Rue Maugout, not one confronted him. La Mère Corniche had been replaced by another concierge, bent and wrinkled after the manner of concierges, as though her life had been passed at her post.

Among the counts and barons, marshals and princes, of the Empire, galloping in glory, shouting frantically "Vive l'Empereur!" Dossonville recognized with bewilderment figures of Jacobins and Girondins, once worshipers of the sacred Republic. He sought out the Maison Talaru; lackeys were lounging before the door and a stream of carriages rolling through the restored porte-cochère. Once, hearing the rumor of a great execution for the afternoon, with a revival of interest he asked a passer-by:

"And the executioner, what do you call him?"

"Sanson."

"Charles Sanson?"

"His son."

Recalling the prophecy of the father, indifferent servitor to republic or kingdom, he returned pensively to the boulevards, where, to rid himself of black memories, he selected among the pomp and the glitter a fashionable café, and installed himself.

Presently, reviewing idly the gorgeous clientele, his eye rested on a knot of generals. The figure of the speaker caught his memory by a certain trick of exuberant gesture that recalled a comrade of other days. Calling a waiter, he demanded:

"That man over there, decorated with medals and laughing, in that cluster of fighters, do you see him?"

"The Baron de Ricordo--yes, sir."

"What's his name?"

"The Baron de Ricordo; a great man in the Senate, sir."

"Ah, I thought he resembled some one else. Thanks."

Almost immediately, dissatisfied, he recalled him.

"And his family name? Find that out."

"Monsieur, he is a Barabant, of the well-known Barabants of the Midi. The family is honorable and old. I--"

"Never mind. Ah, one thing more. Is he married? Tell me that."

"Monsieur, he marries this month,--a great marriage."

"Enough. That's sufficient."

At this moment the party pushed back their chairs and came straggling toward him.

"When you're young all folly's possible," said the voice of Barabant at his elbow.

"It's a wonder, I say, that we survive to middle age."

"Dame, yes!" replied the baron. "Will you believe it of me--at twenty-five I wept because I could not die for an idea!"

Dossonville, who was on the point of rising, fell back and lowered his head. The resplendent group swaggered down to the sidewalk, where presently a magnificent equipage rolled up, a lady extended her hand to the Baron de Ricordo, who, nodding to his comrades, sprang into the carriage and drove off.

Pushing back the untasted glass, Dossonville rang for his bill.

"Monsieur doesn't take his drink," the garçon objected.

Dossonville, looking down, saw that it was true.

"There is something the matter, monsieur?"

"Exactly."

"Monsieur complains--"

"Ah, I have looked at the bottom of the glass, my friend," he answered; but his glance was in the street. "When one drinks one should never do that."

Leaving the perplexed garçon to turn over his words, he sauntered among the thronged tables, and joining the slow procession of the promenaders, was swept gradually away.