guillotine myself and cut off the head of every able-bodied man or woman
in Boulogne, with my own hands."

As he said this his face assumed such an expression of inhuman cruelty,
such a desire to kill, such a savage lust for blood, that instinctively
Chauvelin shuddered and shrank away from his colleague. All through
his career there is no doubt that this man, who was of gentle birth,
of gentle breeding, and who had once been called M. le Marquis de
Chauvelin, must have suffered in his susceptibilities and in his pride
when in contact with the revolutionaries with whom he had chosen to cast
his lot. He could not have thrown off all his old ideas of refinement
quite so easily, as to feel happy in the presence of such men as Collot
d'Herbois, or Marat in his day--men who had become brute beats, more
ferocious far than any wild animal, more scientifically cruel than any
feline prowler in jungle or desert.

One look in Collot's distorted face was sufficient at this moment to
convince Chauvelin that it were useless for him to view the proclamation
against the citizens of Boulogne merely as an idle threat, even if he
had wished to do so. That Marguerite would not, under the circumstances,
attempt to escape, that Sir Percy Blakeney himself would be forced
to give up all thoughts of rescuing her, was a foregone conclusion
in Chauvelin's mind, but if this high-born English gentleman had not
happened to be the selfless hero that he was, if Marguerite Blakeney
were cast in a different, a rougher mould--if, in short, the Scarlet
Pimpernel in the face of the proclamation did succeed in dragging his
wife out of the clutches of the Terrorists, then it was equally certain
that Collot d'Herbois would carry out his rabid and cruel reprisals
to the full. And if in the course of the wholesale butchery of the
able-bodied and wage-earning inhabitants of Boulogne, the headsman
should sink worn out, then would this ferocious sucker of blood put his
own hand to the guillotine, with the same joy and lust which he had
felt when he ordered one hundred and thirty-eight women of Nantes to
be stripped naked by the soldiery before they were flung helter-skelter
into the river.

A touch of strength and determination! Aye! Citizen Collot d'Herbois had
plenty of that. Was it he, or Carriere who at Arras commanded mothers to
stand by while their children were being guillotined? And surely it was
Maignet, Collot's friend and colleague, who at Bedouin, be