ne of these magistrates may have pried into the
most sacred intimacies of the fair body that was to his morbid fancy at
the same moment a living and a dead woman's, and that, gloating over
voluptuous and ghoulish imaginings he may have found an atrocious
pleasure in giving over to the headsman those dainty, desirable
limbs,--this is perhaps a thing better left unsaid, but one which no one
can deem impossible who knows what men are. Evariste Gamelin, cold and
pedantic in his artistic creed, could see no beauty but in the Antique;
he admired beauty, but it hardly stirred his senses. His classical taste
was so severe he rarely found a woman to his liking; he was as
insensible to the charms of a pretty face as he was to Fragonard's
colouring and Boucher's drawing. He had never known desire save under
the form of deep passion.

Like the majority of his colleagues in the Tribunal, he thought women
more dangerous than men. He hated the _ci-devant_ princesses, the
creatures he pictured to himself in his horrified dreams in company with
Elisabeth and _the Austrian_ weaving plots to assassinate good patriots;
he even hated all those fair mistresses of financiers, philosophers, and
men of letters whose only crime was having enjoyed the pleasures of the
senses and the mind and lived at a time when it was sweet to live. He
hated them without admitting the feeling to himself, and when he had one
before him at the bar, he condemned her out of pique, convinced all the
while that he was dooming her justly and rightly for the public good.
His sense of honour, his manly modesty, his cold, calculated wisdom, his
devotion to the State, his virtues in a word, pushed under the knife
heads that might well have moved men's pity.

But what is this, what is the meaning of this strange prodigy? Once the
difficulty was to find the guilty, to search them out in their lair, to
drag the confession of their crime from reluctant lips. Now, there is no
hunting with a great pack of sleuth-hounds, no pursuing a timid prey;
lo! from all sides come the victims to offer themselves a voluntary
sacrifice. Nobles, virgins, soldiers, courtesans, flock to the Tribunal,
dragging their condemnation from dilatory judges, claiming death as a
right which they are impatient to enjoy. Not enough the multitude with
which the zeal of the informers has crowded the prisons and which the
Public Prosecutor and his myrmidons are wearing out their lives in
haling before the Tri