icted of having destroyed wheat-stuffs in
order to starve the people, three _emigres_ who had returned to foment
civil war in France, two ladies of pleasure of the Palais-Egalite,
fourteen Breton conspirators, men, women, old men, youths, masters, and
servants. The crime was proven, the law explicit. Among the guilty was a
girl of twenty, adorable in the heyday of her young beauty under the
shadow of the doom so soon to overwhelm her, a fascinating figure. A
blue bow bound her golden locks, her lawn kerchief revealed a white,
graceful neck.

Evariste was consistent in casting his vote for death, and all the
accused, with the one exception of an old gardener, were sent to the
scaffold.

The following week Evariste and his section mowed down sixty-three
heads--forty-five men and eighteen women.

The judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal drew no distinction between men
and women, in this following a principle as old as justice itself. True,
the President Montane, touched by the bravery and beauty of Charlotte
Corday, had tried to save her by paltering with the procedure of the
trial and had thereby lost his seat, but women as a rule were shown no
favour under examination, in strict accordance with the rule common to
all the tribunals. The jurors feared them, distrusting their artful
ways, their aptitude for deception, their powers of seduction. They were
the match of men in resolution, and this invited the Tribunal to treat
them in the same way. The majority of those who sat in judgment, men of
normal sensuality or sensual on occasion, were in no wise affected by
the fact that the prisoner was a woman. They condemned or acquitted them
as their conscience, their zeal, their love, lukewarm or vehement, for
the Republic dictated. Almost always they appeared before the court with
their hair carefully dressed and attired with as much elegance as the
unhappy conditions allowed. But few of them were young and still fewer
pretty. Confinement and suspense had blighted them, the harsh light of
the hall betrayed their weariness and the anguish they had endured,
beating down on faded lids, blotched and pimpled cheeks, white, drawn
lips. Nevertheless, the fatal chair more than once held a young girl,
lovely in her pallor, while a shadow of the tomb veiled her eyes and
made her beauty the more seductive. That the sight had the power to melt
some jurymen and irritate others, who should deny? That, in the secret
depraved heart of him, o