r abandonment
he had just lived would never be his again.

He returned by the Champs Elysees, where women in light summer dresses
were sitting on wooden chairs, talking or sewing, while their children
played under the trees. A woman selling "ladies' pleasures,"--_her_ box
was shaped like a drum--reminded him of the one he had spoken to in the
Allee des Veuves, and it seemed as if a whole epoch of his life had
elapsed between the two encounters. He crossed the Place de la
Revolution. In the Tuileries gardens he caught the distant roar of a
host of men, a sound of many voices shouting in accord, so familiar in
those great days of popular enthusiasm which the enemies of the
Revolution declared would never dawn again. He quickened his pace as the
noise grew louder and louder, reached the Rue Honore and found it
thronged with a crowd of men and women yelling: "Vive la Republique!
Vive la Liberte!" The walls of the gardens, the windows, the balconies,
the very roofs were black with lookers-on waving hats and handkerchiefs.
Preceded by a sapper, who cleared a way for the procession, surrounded
by Municipal Officers, National Guards, gunners, gendarmes, huzzars,
advanced slowly, high above the backs of the citizens, a man of a
bilious complexion, a wreath of oak-leaves about his brow, his body
wrapped in an old green surtout with an ermine collar. The women threw
him flowers, while he cast about him the piercing glance of his
jaundiced eyes, as though, in this enthusiastic multitude he was still
searching out enemies of the people to denounce, traitors to punish. As
he went by, Gamelin bent his head and joining his voice to a hundred
thousand others, shouted his:

"Vive Marat!"

The triumphant hero entered the Hall of the Convention like Fate
personified. While the crowd slowly dispersed Gamelin sat on a stone
post in the Rue Honore and pressed his hand over his heart to check its
wild beating. What he had seen filled him with high emotion and burning
enthusiasm.

He loved and worshipped Marat, who, sick and fevered, his veins on fire,
eaten up by ulcers, was wearing out the last remnants of his strength in
the service of the Republic, and in his own poor house, closed to no
man, welcomed him with open arms, conversed eagerly with him of public
affairs, questioned him sometimes on the machinations of evil-doers. He
rejoiced that the enemies of _the Just_, conspiring for his ruin, had
prepared his triumph; he blessed the Re