The Jacobins, like the Cordeliers, and
the Feuillants, had appropriated the premises and taken the name of the
dispossessed monks. Gamelin, once a regular attendant at the sittings of
the Cordeliers, did not find at the Jacobins the familiar sabots,
carmagnoles and rallying cries of the Dantonists. In Robespierre's club
administrative reserve and bourgeois gravity were the order of the day.
The Friend of the People was no more, and since his death Evariste had
followed the lessons of Maximilien whose thought ruled the Jacobins, and
thence, through a thousand affiliated societies was disseminated over
all France. During the reading of the minutes, his eyes wandered over
the bare, dismal walls, which, after sheltering the spiritual sons of
the arch-inquisitor of heresy, now looked down on the assemblage of
zealous inquisitors of crimes against the fatherland.

There, without pomp or ceremony, sat the body that was the chiefest
power of the State and ruled by force of words. It governed the city,
the empire, dictated its decrees to the Convention itself. These
artisans of the new order of things, so respectful of the law that they
continued Royalists in 1791 and would fain have been Royalists still on
the King's return from Varennes, so obstinate in their attachment to the
Constitution, friends of the established order of the State even after
the massacres of the Champ-de-Mars, and never revolutionaries against
the Revolution, heedless of popular agitation, cherished in their dark
and puissant soul a love of the fatherland that had given birth to
fourteen armies and set up the guillotine. Evariste was lost in
admiration of their vigilance, their suspicious temper, their reasoned
dogmatism, their love of system, their supremacy in the art of
governing, their sovereign sanity.

The public that formed the audience gave no token of their presence save
a low, long-drawn murmur as of one voice, like the rustling of the
leaves of the tree of Liberty that stood outside the threshold.

That day, the 11th Vendemiaire, a young man, with a receding brow, a
piercing eye, a sharp prominent nose, a pointed chin, a pock-marked
face, a look of cold self-possession, mounted the tribune slowly. His
hair was white with powder and he wore a blue coat that displayed his
slim figure. He showed the precise carriage and moved with the cadenced
step that made some say in mockery that he was like a dancing-master and
earned him from others the nam