"La guillotine va toujours!"

After the death of Marat, Merlin became the most prominent member of the club—­he and Foucquier-Tinville, his bosom friend, Public Prosecutor, and the most bloodthirsty homicide of this homicidal age.

Bosom friend both, yet they worked against one another, undermining each other’s popularity, whispering persistently, one against the other:  “He is a traitor!” It had become just a neck-to-neck race between them towards the inevitable goal—­the guillotine.

Foucquier-Tinville is in the ascendant for the moment.  Merlin had been given a task which he had failed to accomplish.  For days now, weeks even, the debates of this noble assembly had been chiefly concerned with the downfall of Citizen-Deputy Deroulede.  His popularity, his calm security in the midst of this reign of terror and anarchy, had been a terrible thorn in the flesh of these rabid Jacobins.

And now the climax had been reached.  An anonymous denunciation had roused the hopes of these sanguinary patriots.  It all sounded perfectly plausible.  To try and save that traitor, Marie Antoinette, the widow of Louis Capet, was just the sort of scheme that would originate in the brain of Paul Deroulede.

He had always been at heart an aristocrat, and the feeling of chivalry for a persecuted woman was only the outward signs of his secret adherence to the hated class.

Merlin had been sent to search the Deputy’s house for proofs of the latter’s guilt.

And Merlin had come back empty-handed.

The arrest of a female aristo—­the probable mistress of Deroulede, who obviously had denounced him—­was but small compensation for the failure of the more important capture.

As soon as Merlin joined his friends in the low, ill-lit, evil-smelling room he realised at once that there was a feeling of hostility against him.

Tinville, enthroned on one of the few chairs of which the Cheval Borgne could boast, was surrounded by a group of surly adherents.

On the rough trestles a number of glasses, half filled with raw potato-spirit, gave the keynote to the temper of the assembly.

All those present were dressed in the black-shag spencer, the seedy black breeches, and down-at-heel boots, which had become recognised as the distinctive uniform of the sansculotte party.  The inevitable Phrygian cap, with its tricolour cockade, appeared on the heads of all those present, in various stages of dirt and decay.

Tinville had chosen to assume a sarcastic tone with regard to his whilom bosom friend, Merlin.  Leaning both elbows on the table, he was picking his teeth with a steel fork, and in the intervals of his interesting operation, gave forth his views on the broad principles of patriotism.

Those who sat round him felt that his star was in the ascendant and assumed the position of satellites.  Merlin as he entered had grunted a sullen “Good-eve,” and sat himself down in a remote corner of the room.