The people, stirred up by the terrorists, the furious men of the Mountain, had to be reduced to silence, and the cry, “Long live the constitution of ’93!—­down with the Convention!”—­this cry, which every day rolled on through the streets of Paris like the vague thunderings of the war-drum,—­had to be put down by armed force.  Barrere, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud Varennes, the remnant of the sanguinary administration of Robespierre, the terrorists who excited the people against the Convention, who pressed on the Thermidorists, and wanted to occupy their place, these were the ones who with their adherents and friends threatened the Convention and imperilled its existence.  The Convention rose up in its might and punished these leaders of sedition, so as through fear and horror to disperse the masses of the people.

Barrere, Collot d’Herbois, and Billaud Varennes, were arrested and sent to Cayenne; six of their friends, six republicans and terrorists, were also seized, and as they were convicted of forging plots against the Convention and the actual administration, they were sentenced to death.  A seventh had also been at the head of this conspiracy; and this seventh one, who with the others had been sentenced to death, and whom the Committee of Safety had watched for everywhere, to bring down upon him the chastisement due, this seventh one was Salicetti—­the same Salicetti who after the fall of Robespierre had arrested General Bonaparte as suspect.  Bonaparte had never forgiven him, and though he often met him in the house of Madame de Permont, and appeared to be reconciled with him, yet he could not forget that he was the one who had stopped him in the midst of his course of fame, that it was he who had debarred him from his whole career.

“Salicetti has done me much harm,” said Bonaparte to Madame de Permont, and a strange look from his eyes met her face—­“Salicetti has destroyed my future in its dawn.  He has blighted my plans of fame in their bud.  I repeat, he has done me much harm.  He has been my evil spirit.  I can never forget it,” but added he, thoughtfully, “I will now try to forgive.” [Footnote:  Abrantes, vol. i, p. 300.]

And again a peculiar, searching look of his eyes met the face of Madame de Permont.

She, however, turned aside, she avoided his look, for she dared not tell him that Salicetti, for whom the Convention searched throughout Paris so as to bring upon him the execution of his death-warrant—­ that Salicetti, whom Bonaparte so fiercely hated, was hid a few steps from him in the little cabinet near the drawing-room.

Like Bonaparte, Salicetti was the countryman of Madame de Permont; in the days of his power, he had saved the husband and the son of Panonia from the persecution of the terrorists, and lie had now come to ask safety from those whom he had once saved.

Madame de Permont had not had the courage to refuse an asylum to Salicetti; she kept him secreted in her house for weeks; and during all these weeks, Bonaparte came daily to visit Madame de Permont and her children, and every day he turned the conversation upon Salicetti, and asked if they knew not yet where he was secreted.  And every time, when Madame de Permont answered him in the negative, he gazed at her with a piercing look, and with his light, sarcastic smile.