more
carefully in her hood, had from one day to the next assumed a fine,
consequential air, a Republican haughtiness and the dignified carriage
suitable to the mother of a juror of the State.

The veneration for the law in which she had been brought up, the
admiration with which the magistrate's gown and cassock had from a child
inspired her, the holy terror she had always experienced at sight of
those to whom God had delegated on earth His divine right of life and
death, these feelings made her regard as an august and worshipful and
holy being the son whom till yesterday she had thought of as little more
than a child. To her simple mind the conviction of the continuity of
justice through all the changes of the Revolution was as strong as was
that of the legislators of the Convention regarding the continuity of
the State under varying systems of government, and the Revolutionary
Tribunal appeared to her every whit as majestic as any of the
time-honoured jurisdictions she had been taught to revere.

The _citoyen_ Brotteaux showed the young magistrate an interest mingled
with surprise and a reluctant deference. His views were the same as the
widow Gamelin's as to the continuity of justice under successive
governments; but, in flat contradiction to that good lady's attitude,
his scorn for the Revolutionary Tribunals was on a par with his contempt
for the courts of the ancien regime. Not daring to express his opinions
openly and unable to make up his mind to say nothing, he indulged in a
string of paradoxes which Gamelin understood just well enough to suspect
the anti-patriotism that underlay them.

"The august tribunal whereon you are soon to take your seat," he told
him on one occasion, "was instituted by the French Senate for the
security of the Republic; and it was for certain a magnanimous thought
on the part of our legislators to set up a court to try our enemies. I
appreciate its generosity, but I doubt its wisdom. It would have shown
greater astuteness, it seems to me, if they had struck down in the dark
the more irreconcilable of their adversaries and won over the rest by
gifts and promises. A tribunal strikes slowly and effects more harm than
it inspires fear; its first duty is to make an example. The mischief
yours does is to unite together all whom it terrifies and make out of a
mass of contradictory interests and passions a great party capable of
common and effective action. You sow fear broadcast, and it is