The Elusive Pimpernel | Page 6

servant of the
Republic.
The sea-green Incorruptible!
And thus whilst others talked and argued, waxed hot over schemes for
processions and pageantry, or loudly denounced the whole matter as the
work of a traitor, he, of the sea-green coat, sat quietly polishing his
nails.
But he had already weighed all these discussions in the balance of his
mind, placed them in the crucible of his ambition, and turned them into
something that would benefit him and strengthen his position.
Aye! the feast should be brilliant enough! gay or horrible, mad or
fearful, but through it all the people of France must be made to feel that
there was a guiding hand which ruled the destinies of all, a head which
framed the new laws, which consolidated the new religion and
established its new goddess: the Goddess of Reason.

Robespierre, her prophet!
Chapter II
: A Retrospect

The room was close and dark, filled with the smoke from a defective
chimney.
A tiny boudoir, once the dainty sanctum of imperious Marie Antoinette;
a faint and ghostly odour, like unto the perfume of spectres, seemed
still to cling to the stained walls, and to the torn Gobelin tapestries.
Everywhere lay the impress of a heavy and destroying hand: that of the
great and glorious Revolution.
In the mud-soiled corners of the room a few chairs, with brocaded
cushions rudely torn, leant broken and desolate against the walls. A
small footstool, once gilt-legged and satin-covered, had been
overturned and roughly kicked to one side, and there it lay on its back,
like some little animal that had been hurt, stretching its broken limbs
upwards, pathetic to behold.
From the delicately wrought Buhl table the silver inlay had been
harshly stripped out of its bed of shell.
Across the Lunette, painted by Boucher and representing a chaste
Diana surrounded by a bevy of nymphs, an uncouth hand had scribbled
in charcoal the device of the Revolution: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite ou
la Mort; whilst, as if to give a crowning point to the work of destruction
and to emphasise its motto, someone had decorated the portrait of
Marie Antoinette with a scarlet cap, and drawn a red and ominous line
across her neck.
And at the table two men were sitting in close and eager conclave.
Between them a solitary tallow candle, unsnuffed and weirdly

flickering, threw fantastic shadows upon the walls, and illumined with
fitful and uncertain light the faces of the two men.
How different were these in character!
One, high cheek-boned, with coarse, sensuous lips, and hair elaborately
and carefully powdered; the other pale and thin-lipped, with the keen
eyes of a ferret and a high intellectual forehead, from which the sleek
brown hair was smoothly brushed away.
The first of these men was Robespierre, the ruthless and incorruptible
demagogue; the other was Citizen Chauvelin, ex-ambassador of the
Revolutionary Government at the English Court.
The hour was late, and the noises from the great, seething city
preparing for sleep came to this remote little apartment in the now
deserted Palace of the Tuileries, merely as a faint and distant echo.
It was two days after the Fructidor Riots. Paul Deroulede and the
woman Juliette Marny, both condemned to death, had been literally
spirited away out of the cart which was conveying them from the Hall
of Justice to the Luxembourg Prison, and news had just been received
by the Committee of Public Safety that at Lyons, the Abbe du Mesnil,
with the ci-devant Chevalier d'Egremont and the latter's wife and
family, had effected a miraculous and wholly incomprehensible escape
from the Northern Prison.
But this was not all. When Arras fell into the hands of the
Revolutionary army, and a regular cordon was formed round the town,
so that not a single royalist traitor might escape, some three score
women and children, twelve priests, the old aristocrats Chermeuil,
Delleville and Galipaux and many others, managed to pass the barriers
and were never recaptured.
Raids were made on the suspected houses: in Paris chiefly where the
escaped prisoners might have found refuge, or better still where their
helpers and rescuers might still be lurking. Foucquier Tinville, Public
Prosecutor, led and conducted these raids, assisted by that bloodthirsty

vampire, Merlin. They heard of a house in the Rue de l'Ancienne
Comedie where an Englishmen was said to have lodged for two days.
They demanded admittance, and were taken to the rooms where the
Englishman had stayed. These were bare and squalid, like hundreds of
other rooms in the poorer quarters of Paris. The landlady, toothless and
grimy, had not yet tidied up the one where the Englishman had slept: in
fact she did not know he had left for good.
He had paid for his room, a week in advance, and came and went as he