d.

They saw God, these jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Supreme
Being, acknowledged by Maximilien, flooded them with His flames of
light. They loved, they believed.

The chair of the accused had been replaced by a vast platform able to
accommodate fifty persons; the court only dealt with batches now. The
Public Prosecutor would often confound under the same charge or
implicate as accomplices individuals who met each other for the first
time before the Tribunal. The latter, taking advantage of the terrible
facilities accorded by the law of Prairial, sat in judgment on those
supposed prison plots which, coming after the proscriptions of the
Dantonists and the Commune, were made to seem their outcome by the
insinuations of cunning adversaries. In fact, to let the world
appreciate the two essential characteristics of a conspiracy fomented by
foreign gold against the Republic,--to wit inopportune moderation on the
one hand and self-interested excess of zeal on the other, they had
united in the same condemnation two very different women, the widow of
Camille Desmoulins, poor lovable Lucille, and the widow of the Hebertist
Momoro, goddess of a day and jolly companion all her life. Both, to
make the analogy complete, had been shut up in the same prison, where
they had mingled their tears on the same bench; both, to round off the
resemblance, had climbed the scaffold. Too ingenious the symbol,--a
masterpiece of equilibrium, conceived doubtless by a lawyer's brain, and
the honour of which was given to Maximilien. This representative of the
people was accredited with every eventuality, happy or unhappy, that
came about in the Republic, every change that was effected in the laws,
in manners and morals, the very course of the seasons, the harvests, the
incidence of epidemics. Unjust of course, but not unmerited the
injustice, for indeed the man, the little, spruce, cat-faced dandy, was
all powerful with the people....

That day the Tribunal was clearing off a batch of prisoners involved in
the great plot, thirty or more conspirators from the Luxembourg,
submissive enough in gaol, but Royalists or Federalists of the most
pronounced type. The prosecution relied almost entirely on the evidence
of a single informer. The jurors did not know one word of the
matter,--not so much as the conspirators' names. Gamelin, casting his
eye over the prisoners' bench, recognized Fortune Chassagne among the
accused. Julie's lover, pale-fa