r gravely.

'No--that is--not I; but--I forget how it was--we were--I'll remember it
by and by.'

'Why, you told me a few days back that you were Mirabeau.'

'No, no,' said another, 'he said he was Alfieri; I was present.'

'Mirabeau's hair was long and wiry. It was not soft like mine,' said
Gerald. 'When he shook it back, he used to say, "I'll show them the
boar's head."'

'Yes. He's right, that was a favourite saying of Mirabeau's,' whispered
another.

'And they are all gone now,' said Gerald with a deep sigh.

'Ay, Maitre, every man of them. All the Girondins; all the friends of
liberty; all the kind spirits who loved men as their brothers; and the
guillotine better than the men.'

'And Vergniaud and Fonfrede, you surely knew them?'

Gerald shook his head.

'It was your friend Robespierre sent them to the knife.' Gerald started,
and tried to understand what was said.

'Ask him about La Gabrielle,' whispered another. 'What of La Gabrielle?
she was Marietta,' cried Gerald wildly.

'She might have been. We only knew her as she figured before our own
eyes. In November last she was the Goddess of Reason.'

'No, no; I deny it,' cried another; 'La Gabrielle had fled from France
before.'

'She was the Goddess of Reason, I repeat,' said the other. 'She that
used to blush scarlet, when they led her out, after the scene, to
receive the plaudits of the audience, stood shameless before the mob on
the steps of the Pantheon.'

'And I tell you her name was Maillard; it was easy enough to mistake her
for La Gabrielle, for she had the same long, waving, light-brown hair.'

'Marietta's hair was black as night,' muttered Gerald; 'her complexion,
too, was the deep olive of the far south, and of her own peculiar race,
_I_ ought to know,' added he aloud; 'we wandered many a pleasant mile
together through the valleys of the Apennines.'

The glance of compassionate pity they turned upon him showed how they
read these remembrances of the past.

'Which of you has dared to speak ill of her?' cried he suddenly, as a
gleam of intelligence shot through his reverie. 'Was it you? or you? or
you?'

'Far be it from _me_,' said Courtel, a young debauchee of the Jacobin
party; 'I admire her much. She has limbs for a statuary to match; and
though this poor picture gives but a sorry idea of such perfections, it
is not all unlike!'

As he spoke, he drew forth a coarse print of the Goddess of Reason, as
she stood unveiled, almost