ll.

Across the Lunette, painted by Boucher and representing a chaste
Diana surrounded by a bevy of nymphs, an uncouth hand had scribbled in
charcoal the device of the Revolution: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite
ou la Mort; whilst, as if to give a crowning point to the work of
destruction and to emphasise its motto, someone had decorated the
portrait of Marie Antoinette with a scarlet cap, and drawn a red and
ominous line across her neck.

And at the table two men were sitting in close and eager conclave.

Between them a solitary tallow candle, unsnuffed and weirdly flickering,
threw fantastic shadows upon the walls, and illumined with fitful and
uncertain light the faces of the two men.

How different were these in character!

One, high cheek-boned, with coarse, sensuous lips, and hair elaborately
and carefully powdered; the other pale and thin-lipped, with the keen
eyes of a ferret and a high intellectual forehead, from which the sleek
brown hair was smoothly brushed away.

The first of these men was Robespierre, the ruthless and incorruptible
demagogue; the other was Citizen Chauvelin, ex-ambassador of the
Revolutionary Government at the English Court.

The hour was late, and the noises from the great, seething city
preparing for sleep came to this remote little apartment in the now
deserted Palace of the Tuileries, merely as a faint and distant echo.

It was two days after the Fructidor Riots. Paul Deroulede and the woman
Juliette Marny, both condemned to death, had been literally spirited
away out of the cart which was conveying them from the Hall of Justice
to the Luxembourg Prison, and news had just been received by the
Committee of Public Safety that at Lyons, the Abbe du Mesnil, with the
ci-devant Chevalier d'Egremont and the latter's wife and family, had
effected a miraculous and wholly incomprehensible escape from the
Northern Prison.

But this was not all. When Arras fell into the hands of the
Revolutionary army, and a regular cordon was formed round the town, so
that not a single royalist traitor might escape, some three score women
and children, twelve priests, the old aristocrats Chermeuil, Delleville
and Galipaux and many others, managed to pass the barriers and were
never recaptured.

Raids were made on the suspected houses: in Paris chiefly where the
escaped prisoners might have found refuge, or better still where their
helpers and rescuers might still be lurking. Foucquier Tinville, Public
P