nd splutter, and scatter
grease and tar around and wetting the lightly-covered shoulders
of tarlatan-clad Columbines. But no one cared! The glow of so much
merrymaking kept the blood warm and the skin dry.

The flour all came off the Pierrots' faces, the blue paper slashings of
the drummer-in-chief hung in pulpy lumps against his gorgeous scarlet
cloak. The trumpeters' feathers became streaky and bedraggled.

But in the name of that good God who had ceased to exist, who in the
world or out of it cared if it rained, or thundered and stormed! This
was a national holiday, for an English spy was captured, and all natives
of Boulogne were free of the guillotine to-night.

The revellers were making the circuit of the town, with lanthorns
fluttering in the wind, and flickering torches held up aloft illumining
laughing faces, red with the glow of a drunken joy, young faces that
only enjoyed the moment's pleasure, serious ones that withheld a frown
at thought of the morrow. The fitful light played on the grotesque
masques of beasts and reptiles, on the diamond necklace of a very
earthly goddess, on God's glorious spoils from gardens and country-side,
on smothered anxiety and repressed cruelty.

The crowd had turned its back on the guillotine, and the trumpets
now changed the inspiriting tune of the "Marseillaise" to the ribald
vulgarity of the "Ca ira!"

Everyone yelled and shouted. Girls with flowing hair produced
broomsticks, and astride on these, broke from the ranks and danced a mad
and obscene saraband, a dance of witches in the weird glow of sizzling
torches, to the accompaniment of raucous laughter and of coarse jokes.

Thus the procession passed on, a sight to gladden the eyes of those who
had desired to smother all thought of the Infinite, of Eternity and of
God in the minds of those to whom they had nothing to offer in return.
A threat of death yesterday, misery, starvation and squalor! all the
hideousness of a destroying anarchy, that had nothing to give save a
national fete, a tinsel goddess, some shallow laughter and momentary
intoxication, a travesty of clothes and of religion and a dance on the
ashes of the past.

And there along the ramparts where the massive walls of the city
encircled the frowning prisons of Gayole and the old Chateau, dark
groups were crouching, huddled together in compact masses, which in
the gloom seemed to vibrate with fear. Like hunted quarry seeking for
shelter, sombre figures fla