I Will Repay | Page 9

Corday, with the inscription: "Greater than Brutus", to Charlier, who
would have had her publicly tortured and burned at the stake for her
crime - Déroulède alone said nothing, and was allowed to remain silent.
The most seething time of that seething revolution. No one knew in the
morning if his head would still be on his own shoulders in the evening,
or if it would be held up by Citizen Samson the headsman, for the
sansculottes of Paris to see.
Yet Déroulède was allowed to go his own way. Marat once said of him:
"Il n'est pas dangereux." The phrase had been taken up. Within the
precincts of the National Convention, Marat was still looked upon as
the great protagonist of Liberty, a martyr to his own convictions carried
to the extreme, to squalor and dirt, to the downward levelling of man to
what is the lowest type in humanity. And his sayings were still
treasured up: even the Girondins did not dare to attack his memory.
Dead Marat was more powerful than his living presentment had been.
And he had said that Déroulède was not dangerous. Not dangerous to
Republicanism, to liberty, to that downward, levelling process, the
tearing down of old traditions, and the annihilation of past pretensions.
Déroulède had once been very rich. He had had sufficient prudence to
give away in good time that which, undoubtedly, would have been
taken away from him later on.
But when he gave willingly, at a time when France needed it most, and
before she had learned how to help herself to what she wanted.
And somehow, in this instance, France had not forgotten: an invisible
fortress seemed to surround Citizen Déroulède and keep his enemies at
bay. They were few, but they existed. The National Convention trusted

him. "He was not dangerous" to them. The people looked upon him as
one of themselves, who gave whilst he had something to give. Who can
gauge that most elusive of all things: Popularity?
He lived a quiet life, and had never yielded to the omni-prevalent
temptation of writing pamphlets, but lived alone with his mother and
Anne Mie, the little orphaned cousin whom old Madame Déroulède
had taken care of, ever since the child could toddle.
Everyone knew his house in the Rue Ecole de Médecine, not far from
the one wherein Marat lived and died, the only solid, stone house in the
midst of a row of hovels, evil-smelling and squalid.
The street was narrow then, as it is now, and whilst Paris was cutting
off the heads of her children for the sake of Liberty and Fraternity, she
had no time to bother about cleanliness and sanitation.
Rue Ecole de Médecine did little credit to the school after which it was
named, and it was a most unattractive crowd that usually thronged its
uneven, muddy pavements.
A neat gown, a clean kerchief, were quite an unusual sight down this
way, for Anne Mie seldom went out, and old Madame Déroulède
hardly ever left her room. A good deal of brandy was being drunk at the
two drinking bars, one at each end of the long, narrow street, and by
five o'clock in the afternoon it was undoubtedly best for women to
remain indoors.
The crowd of dishevelled elderly Amazons who stood gossiping at the
street corner could hardly be called women now. A ragged petticoat, a
greasy red kerchief round the head, a tattered, stained shift - to this pass
of squalor and shame had Liberty brought the daughters of France.
And they jeered at any passer-by less filthy, less degraded than
themselves.
"Ah! voyons l'aristo!" they shouted every time a man in decent clothes,
a woman with tidy cap and apron, passed swiftly down the street.

And the afternoons were very lively. There was always plenty to see:
first and foremost, the long procession of tumbrils, winding its way
from the prisons to the Place de la Révolution. The forty-four thousand
sections of the Committee of Public Safety sent their quota, each in
their turn, to the guillotine.
At one time these tumbrils contained royal ladies and gentlemen,
ci-devant dukes and princesses, aristocrats from every county in France,
but now this stock was becoming exhausted. The wretched Queen
Marie Antoinette still lingered in the Temple with her son and daughter.
Madame Elisabeth was still allowed to say her prayers in peace, but
ci-devantdukes and counts were getting scarce: those who had not
perished at the hand of Citizen Samson were plying some trade in
Germany or England.
There were aristocratic joiners, innkeepers, and hairdressers. The
proudest names in France were hidden beneath trade signs in London
and Hamburg. A good number owed their lives to that mysterious
Scarlet Pimpernel, that unknown Englishman who had snatched scores
of victims from