, set about organizing the victory
that is impossible, but is bound to come. And verily they _must_ win the
day. These men of no account, who had destroyed Royalty and upset the
old order of things, this Trubert, a penniless optician, this Evariste
Gamelin, an unknown dauber, could expect no mercy from their enemies.
They had no choice save between victory and death. Hence both their
fervour and their serenity.

II

Quitting the Barnabites, Evariste Gamelin set off in the direction of
the Place Dauphine, now renamed the Place de Thionville in honour of a
city that had shown itself impregnable.

Situated in the busiest quarter of Paris, the _Place_ had long lost the
fine stateliness it had worn a hundred years ago; the mansions forming
its three sides, built in the days of Henri IV in one uniform style, of
red brick with white stone dressings, to lodge splendour-loving
magistrates, had had their imposing roofs of slate removed to make way
for two or three wretched storeys of lath and plaster or had even been
demolished altogether and replaced by shabby whitewashed houses, and now
displayed only a series of irregular, poverty-stricken, squalid fronts,
pierced with countless narrow, unevenly spaced windows enlivened with
flowers in pots, birdcages, and rags hanging out to dry. These were
occupied by a swarm of artisans, jewellers, metal-workers, clockmakers,
opticians, printers, laundresses, sempstresses, milliners, and a few
grey-beard lawyers who had not been swept away in the storm of
revolution along with the King's courts.

It was morning and springtime. Golden sunbeams, intoxicating as new
wine, played on the walls and flashed gaily in at garret casements.
Every sash of every window was thrown open, showing the housewives'
frowsy heads peeping out. The Clerk of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who
had just left his house on his way to Court, distributed amicable taps
on the cheeks of the children playing under the trees. From the
Pont-Neuf came the crier's voice denouncing the treason of the infamous
Dumouriez.

Evariste Gamelin lived in a house on the side towards the Quai de
l'Horloge, a house that dated from Henri IV and would still have
preserved a not unhandsome appearance but for a mean tiled attic that
had been added on to heighten the building under the last but one of the
_tyrants_. To adapt the lodging of some erstwhile dignitary of the
_Parlement_ to the exigencies of the bourgeois and artisan hou