oor closed, the
postillion's whip cracked briskly, and they set out upon a journey which
to La Boulaye was to be as the passing from one life to another.

PART II. THE NEW RULE

Allons! Marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!
La Marseillaise.

CHAPTER V. THE SHEEP TURNED WOLVES

There were roars of anger and screams of terror in the night, and above
the Chateau de Bellecour the inky blackness of the heavens was broken by
a dull red glow, which the distant wayfarer might have mistaken for the
roseate tint of dawn, were it possible for the dawn to restrict itself
to so narrow an area.

Ever and anon a tongue of flame would lick up into the night towards
that russet patch of sky, betraying the cause of it and proclaiming
that incendiaries were at work. Above the ominous din that told of
the business afoot there came now and again the crack of a musket,
and dominating all other sounds was the sullen roar of the revolted
peasants, the risen serfs, the rebellious vassals of the Siegneur de
Bellecour.

For time has sped and has much altered in the speeding. Four years have
gone by since the night on which the lacerated Caron la Boulaye was
smuggled out of Bellecour in Robespierre's berline and in that four
years much of the things that were prophesied have come to pass
--aye, and much more besides that was undreamt of at the outset by the
revolutionaries. A gruesome engine that they facetiously called
the National Razor--invented and designed some years ago by one Dr.
Guillotin--is but an item in the changes that have been, yet an item
that in its way has become a very factor. It stands not over-high, yet
the shadow of it has fallen athwart the whole length and breadth of
France, and in that shadow the tyrants have trembled, shaken to the very
souls of them by the rude hand of fear; in that shadow the spurned and
downtrodden children of the soil have taken heart of grace. The bonds
of servile cowardice that for centuries had trammelled them have been
shaken off like cobwebs, and they that were as sheep are now become the
wolves that prey on those that preyed on them for generations.

There is, in the whole of France, no corner so remote but that, sooner
or later, this great upheaval has penetrated to it. Louis XVI.--or
Louis Capet, as he is now more generally spoken of--has been arraigned,
condemned and executed. The aristocrats are in full emigratory flight
across the f