also caused no small measure of annoyance that fishermen were
ordered to wear tricolour cockades on their caps. They had no special
ill-feeling against tricolour cockades, but they did not care about
them. Jean-Marie flatly refused to have one pinned on, and being
admonished somewhat severely by one of the Paris officials, he became
obstinate about the whole thing and threw the cockade violently on the
ground and spat upon it, not from any sentiment of anti-republicanism,
but just from a feeling of Norman doggedness.

He was arrested, shut up in Fort Gayole, tried as a traitor and publicly
guillotined.

The consternation in Boulogne was appalling.

The one little spark had found its way to a barrel of blasting
powder and caused a terrible explosion. Within twenty-four hours
of Jean-Marie's execution the whole town was in the throes of
the Revolution. What the death of King Louis, the arrest of Marie
Antoinette, the massacres of September had failed to do, that the arrest
and execution of an elderly fisherman accomplished in a trice.

People began to take sides in politics. Some families realized that they
came from ancient lineage, and that their ancestors had helped to build
up the throne of the Bourbons. Others looked up ancient archives and
remembered past oppressions at the hands of the aristocrats.

Thus some burghers of Boulogne became ardent reactionaries, whilst
others secretly nursed enthusiastic royalist convictions: some were
ready to throw in their lot with the anarchists, to deny the religion
of their fathers, to scorn the priests and close the places of worship;
others adhered strictly still to the usages and practices of the Church.

Arrest became frequent: the guillotine, erected in the Place de la
Senechaussee, had plenty of work to do. Soon the cathedral was closed,
the priests thrown into prison, whilst scores of families hoped to
escape a similar fate by summary flight.

Vague rumours of a band of English adventurers soon reached the little
sea-port town. The Scarlet Pimpernel--English spy or hero, as he was
alternately called--had helped many a family with pronounced royalist
tendencies to escape the fury of the blood-thirsty Terrorists.

Thus gradually the anti-revolutionaries had been weeded out of the city:
some by death and imprisonment, others by flight. Boulogne became the
hotbed of anarchism: the idlers and loafers, inseparable from any town
where there is a garrison and a harbour, p