fought with heroic fortitude for the royal cause, enduring the
hardest privations, braving tempests, sleeping on straw and marching at
night; these men whose bodies were hardened by exposure and fatigue,
retained a purity of mind and sincerity really touching. They never
ceased to believe that "the Prince" for whom they fought would one day
come and share their danger. It had been so often announced and so often
put off that a little mistrust might have been forgiven them, but they
had faith, and that inspired them with a thought which seemed quite
simple to them but which was really sublime. While they were lodging in
holes, living on a pittance parsimoniously taken from the party's funds,
they kept a comfortable and secure retreat ready, where "their
prince"--who was never to come--could wait at his ease, until at the
price of their lives, they had assured the success of his cause. If the
history of our bloody feuds has always an epic quality, it is because it
abounds in examples of blind devotion, so impossible nowadays that they
seem to us improbable exaggerations.

After six days at the "Cloche d'Or," Georges took possession of the
house at Chaillot, but he did not stay there long, for about the 25th of
September he was at 21 Rue Careme-Prenant in the Faubourg du Temple.
Hozier had rented an entresol there, and had employed a man called
Spain, who had an aptitude for this sort of work, to make a secret place
in it. Spain, under pretence of indispensable repairs, had shut himself
up with his tools in the apartment, and had made a cleverly-concealed
trap-door, by means of which, in case of alarm, the tenants could
descend to the ground floor and go out by an unoccupied shop whose door
opened under the porch of the house. Spain took a sort of pride in his
strange talent; he was very proud of a hiding-place he had made in the
lodging of a friend, the tailor Michelot, in the Rue de Bussy, which
Michelot himself did not suspect. The tailor was obliged to be absent
often, and four of the conspirators had successively lodged there. When
he was away his lodgers "limbered up" in this apartment, but as soon as
they heard his step on the stairs, they reentered their cell, and the
worthy Michelot, who vaguely surmised that there was some mystery about
his house, only solved the enigma when he was cited to appear before the
tribunal as an accomplice in the royalist plot of which he had never
even heard the name.

Georges starte