There we were all herded together in a couple of attics—­one of which little more than a cupboard—­at the top of a dilapidated half-ruined house in the Rue des Pipots—­Mme. la Marquise, M. le Vicomte and I—­just think of that, monsieur!  M. le Marquis had his chateau, as no doubt you know, on the outskirts of Lyons.  A loyal high-born gentleman; was it likely, I ask you, that he would submit passively to the rule of those execrable revolutionaries who had murdered their King, outraged their Queen and Royal family, and, God help them! had already perpetrated every crime and every abomination for which of a truth there could be no pardon either on earth or in Heaven?  He joined that plucky but, alas! small and ill-equipped army of royalists who, unable to save their King, were at least determined to avenge him.

Well, you know well enough what happened.  The counter-revolution failed; the revolutionary army brought Lyons down to her knees after a siege of two months.  She was then marked down as a rebel city, and after the abominable decree of October 9th had deprived her of her very name, and Couthon had exacted bloody reprisals from the entire population for its loyalty to the King, the infamous Laporte was sent down in order finally to stamp out the lingering remnants of the rebellion.  By that time, monsieur, half the city had been burned down, and one-tenth and more of the inhabitants—­men, women, and children—­had been massacred in cold blood, whilst most of the others had fled in terror from the appalling scene of ruin and desolation.  Laporte completed the execrable work so ably begun by Couthon.  He was a very celebrated and skilful doctor at the Faculty of Medicine, now turned into a human hyena in the name of Liberty and Fraternity.

M. le Marquis contrived to escape with the scattered remnant of the Royalist army into Switzerland.  But Mme la Marquise throughout all these strenuous times had stuck to her post at the chateau like the valiant creature that she was.  When Couthon entered Lyons at the head of the revolutionary army, the whole of her household fled, and I was left alone to look after her and M. le Vicomte.

Then one day when I had gone into Lyons for provisions, I suddenly chanced to hear outside an eating-house that which nearly froze the marrow in my old bones.  A captain belonging to the Revolutionary Guard was transmitting to his sergeant certain orders, which he had apparently just received.

The orders were to make a perquisition at ten o’clock this same evening in the chateau of Mortaine as the Marquis was supposed to be in hiding there, and in any event to arrest every man, woman, and child who was found within its walls.

“Citizen Laporte,” the captain concluded, “knows for a certainty that the ci-devant Marquise and her brat are still there, even if the Marquis has fled like the traitor that he is.  Those cursed English spies who call themselves the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel have been very active in Lyons of late, and citizen Laporte is afraid that they might cheat the guillotine of the carcase of those aristos, as they have already succeeded in doing in the case of a large number of traitors.”