From that attic window she had seen beautiful Paris writhing under the pitiless lash of the demon of terror which it had provoked; she had heard the rumble of the tumbrils, dragging day after day their load of victims to the insatiable maker of this Revolution of Fraternity—­the Guillotine.

She had seen the gay, light-hearted people of this Star-City turned to howling beasts of prey, its women changed to sexless vultures, with murderous talons implanted in everything that is noble, high or beautiful.

She was not twenty when the feeble, vacillating monarch and his imperious consort were dragged back—­a pair of humiliated prisoners—­ to the capital from which they had tried to flee.

Two years later, she had heard the cries of an entire people exulting over a regicide.  Then the murder of Marat, by a young girl like herself, the pale-faced, large-eyed Charlotte, who had commited a crime for the sake of a conviction.  “Greater than Brutus!” some had called her.  Greater than Joan of Arc, for it was to a mission of evil and of sin that she was called from the depths of her Breton village, and not to one of glory and triumph.

“Greater than Brutus!”

Juliette followed the trial of Charlotte Corday with all the passionate ardour of her exalted temperament.

Just think what an effect it must have had upon the mind of this young girl, who for nine years—­the best of her life—­had also lived with the idea of a sublime mission pervading her very soul.

She watched Charlotte Corday at her trial.  Conquering her natural repulsion for such scenes, and the crowds which usually watched them, she had forced her way into the foremost rank of the narrow gallery which overlooked the Hall of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

She heard the indictment, heard Tinville’s speech and the calling of the witnesses.

“All this is unnecessary.  I killed Marat!”

Juliette heard the fresh young voice ringing out clearly above the murmur of voices, the howls of execration; she saw the beautiful young face, clear, calm, impassive.

“I killed Marat!”

And there in the special space allotted to the Citizen-Deputies, sitting among those who represented the party of the Moderate Gironde, was Paul Deroulede, the man whom she had sworn to pursue with a vengeance as great, as complete, as that which guided Charlotte Corday’s hand.

She watched him during the trial, and wondered if he had any presentiment of the hatred which dogged him, like unto the one which had dogged Marat.

He was very dark, almost swarthy a son of the South, with brown hair, free from powder, thrown back and revealing the brow of a student rather than that of a legislator.  He watched Charlotte Corday earnestly, and Juliette who watched him saw the look of measureless pity, which softened the otherwise hard look of his close-set eyes.

He made an impassioned speech for the defence:  a speech which has become historic.  It would have cost any other man his head.