“Of assassins what shall you look for but assassination?  I have a tale to tell which will show that this is no new thing that you have witnessed here to-day; it will reveal to you the forces with which you have to deal.  Yesterday... "

There was an interruption.  A voice in the crowd, some twenty paces, perhaps, was raised to shout: 

“Yet another of them!”

Immediately after the voice came a pistol-shot, and a bullet flattened itself against the bronze figure just behind Andre-Louis.

Instantly there was turmoil in the crowd, most intense about the spot whence the shot had been fired.  The assailant was one of a considerable group of the opposition, a group that found itself at once beset on every side, and hard put to it to defend him.

From the foot of the plinth rang the voice of the students making chorus to Le Chapelier, who was bidding Andre-Louis to seek shelter.

“Come down!  Come down at once!  They’ll murder you as they murdered La Riviere.”

“Let them!” He flung wide his arms in a gesture supremely theatrical, and laughed.  “I stand here at their mercy.  Let them, if they will, add mine to the blood that will presently rise up to choke them.  Let them assassinate me.  It is a trade they understand.  But until they do so, they shall not prevent me from speaking to you, from telling you what is to be looked for in them.”  And again he laughed, not merely in exaltation as they supposed who watched him from below, but also in amusement.  And his amusement had two sources.  One was to discover how glibly he uttered the phrases proper to whip up the emotions of a crowd:  the other was in the remembrance of how the crafty Cardinal de Retz, for the purpose of inflaming popular sympathy on his behalf, had been in the habit of hiring fellows to fire upon his carriage.  He was in just such case as that arch-politician.  True, he had not hired the fellow to fire that pistol-shot; but he was none the less obliged to him, and ready to derive the fullest, advantage from the act.

The group that sought to protect that man was battling on, seeking to hew a way out of that angry, heaving press.

“Let them go!” Andre-Louis called down...  “What matters one assassin more or less?  Let them go, and listen to me, my countrymen!”

And presently, when some measure of order was restored, he began his tale.  In simple language now, yet with a vehemence and directness that drove home every point, he tore their hearts with the story of yesterday’s happenings at Gavrillac.  He drew tears from them with the pathos of his picture of the bereaved widow Mabey and her three starving, destitute children — “orphaned to avenge the death of a pheasant” — and the bereaved mother of that M. de Vilmorin, a student of Rennes, known here to many of them, who had met his death in a noble endeavour to champion the cause of an esurient member of their afflicted order.