against Danton, Hebert
against Robespierre. He it was who instigated the massacres of
September, the atrocities of Nantes, the horrors of Thermidor, the
sacrileges, the noyades: all with the view of causing every section of
the National Assembly to vie with the other in excesses and in cruelty,
until the makers of the Revolution, satiated with their own lust, turned
on one another, and Sardanapalus-like buried themselves and their orgies
in the vast hecatomb of a self-consumed anarchy.

Whether the power thus ascribed to Baron de Batz by his historians is
real or imaginary it is not the purpose of this preface to investigate.
Its sole object is to point out the difference between the career of
this plotter and that of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

The Baron de Batz himself was an adventurer without substance, save that
which he derived from abroad. He was one of those men who have nothing
to lose and everything to gain by throwing themselves headlong in the
seething cauldron of internal politics.

Though he made several attempts at rescuing King Louis first, and
then the Queen and Royal Family from prison and from death, he never
succeeded, as we know, in any of these undertakings, and he never once
so much as attempted the rescue of other equally innocent, if not quite
so distinguished, victims of the most bloodthirsty revolution that has
ever shaken the foundations of the civilised world.

Nay more; when on the 29th Prairial those unfortunate men and women were
condemned and executed for alleged complicity in the so-called "Foreign
Conspiracy," de Batz, who is universally admitted to have been the
head and prime-mover of that conspiracy--if, indeed, conspiracy there
was--never made either the slightest attempt to rescue his confederates
from the guillotine, or at least the offer to perish by their side if he
could not succeed in saving them.

And when we remember that the martyrs of the 29th Prairial included
women like Grandmaison, the devoted friend of de Batz, the beautiful
Emilie de St. Amaranthe, little Cecile Renault--a mere child not sixteen
years of age--also men like Michonis and Roussell, faithful servants
of de Batz, the Baron de Lezardiere, and the Comte de St. Maurice,
his friends, we no longer can have the slightest doubt that the Gascon
plotter and the English gentleman are indeed two very different persons.

The latter's aims were absolutely non-political. He never intrigued
for the restoration of the