day Evariste had to give judgment on the fate of a poor woman,
the widow Meyrion. She distributed bread from house to house and tramped
the streets pushing a little hand-cart and carrying a wooden tally hung
at her waist, on which she cut notches with her knife representing the
number of the loaves she had delivered. Her gains amounted to eight sous
a day. The deputy of the Public Prosecutor displayed an extraordinary
virulence towards the wretched creature, who had, it appears, shouted
"Vive le Roi!" on several occasions, uttered anti-revolutionary remarks
in the houses where she called to leave the daily dole of bread, and
been mixed up in a plot for the escape of the woman Capet. In answer to
the Judge's question she admitted the facts alleged against her; whether
fool or fanatic, she professed Royalist sentiments of the most
enthusiastic sort and waited her doom.

The Revolutionary Tribunal made a point of proving the triumph of
Equality by showing itself just as severe for street-porters and servant
maids as for the aristocrats and financiers. Gamelin could conceive no
other system possible under a popular government. He would have deemed
it a mark of contempt, an insult to the people, to exclude it from
punishment. That would have been to consider it, so to speak, as
unworthy of chastisement by the law. Reserved for aristocrats only, the
guillotine would have appeared to him in the light of an iniquitous
privilege. In his thoughts he was beginning to erect chastisement into a
religious and mystic dogma, to assign it a virtue, a merit of its own;
he conceived that society owes punishment to criminals and that it is
doing them an injustice to cheat them of this right. He declared the
woman Meyrion guilty and deserving of death, only regretting that the
fanatics, more culpable than herself, who had brought her to her ruin,
were not there to share her fate.

* * * * *

Every evening almost Evariste attended the meetings of the Jacobins, who
assembled in the former chapel of the Dominicans, commonly known as
Jacobins, in the Rue Honore. In a courtyard, in which stood a tree of
Liberty, a poplar whose leaves shook and rustled all day in the wind,
the chapel, built in a poor, clumsy style and surmounted by a heavy roof
of tiles, showed its bare gable, pierced by a round window and an
arched doorway, above which floated the National colours, the flagstaff
crowned with the cap of Liberty.