The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel | Page 5

really fine pages
of that revolutionary era.
But with those apologists we have naught to do. History has talked its
fill of the inhuman monster. With the more intimate biographists alone
has this true chronicle any concern. It is one of these who tells us that
on or about the eighteenth day of Messidor, in the year I of the
Republic (a date which corresponds with the sixth of July, 1793, of our
own calendar), Jean Paul Marat took an additional man into his service,
at the instance of Jeannette Marechal, his cook and maid-of-all-work.
Marat was at this time a martyr to an unpleasant form of skin disease,
brought on by the terrible privations which he had endured during the
few years preceding his association with Simonne Evrard, the faithful

friend and housekeeper, whose small fortune subsequently provided
him with some degree of comfort.
The man whom Jeannette Marechal, the cook, introduced into the
household of No. 30, Rue des Cordeliers, that worthy woman had
literally picked one day out of the gutter where he was grabbing for
scraps of food like some wretched starving cur. He appeared to be
known to the police of the section, his identity book proclaiming him to
be one Paul Mole, who had served his time in gaol for larceny. He
professed himself willing to do any work required of him, for the
merest pittance and some kind of roof over his head. Simonne Evrard
allowed Jeannette to take him in, partly out of compassion and partly
with a view to easing the woman's own burden, the only other domestic
in the house--a man named Bas--being more interested in politics and
the meetings of the Club des Jacobins than he was in his master's
ailments. The man Mole, moreover, appeared to know something of
medicine and of herbs and how to prepare the warm baths which alone
eased the unfortunate Marat from pain. He was powerfully built, too,
and though he muttered and grumbled a great deal, and indulged in
prolonged fits of sulkiness, when he would not open his mouth to
anyone, he was, on the whole, helpful and good-tempered.
There must also have been something about his whole wretched
personality which made a strong appeal to the "Friend of the People,"
for it is quite evident that within a few days Paul Mole had won no
small measure of his master's confidence.
Marat, sick, fretful, and worried, had taken an unreasoning dislike to
his servant Bas. He was thankful to have a stranger about him, a man
who was as miserable as he himself had been a very little while ago;
who, like himself, had lived in cellars and in underground burrows, and
lived on the scraps of food which even street-curs had disdained.
On the seventh day following Mole's entry into the household, and
while the latter was preparing his employer's bath, Marat said abruptly
to him:
"You'll go as far as the Chemin de Pantin to-day for me, citizen. You

know your way?"
"I can find it, what?" muttered Mole, who appeared to be in one of his
surly moods.
"You will have to go very circumspectly," Marat went on, in his
cracked and feeble voice. "And see to it that no one spies upon your
movements. I have many enemies, citizen...one especially...a woman....
She is always prying and spying on me....So beware of any woman you
see lurking about at your heels."
Mole gave a half-audible grunt in reply.
"You had best go after dark," the other rejoined after awhile. "Come
back to me after nine o'clock. It is not far to the Chemin de Pantin-- just
where it intersects the Route de Meaux. You can get there and back
before midnight. The people will admit you. I will give you a ring--the
only thing I possess.... It has little or no value," he added with a harsh,
grating laugh. "It will not be worth your while to steal it. You will have
to see a brat and report to me on his condition--his appearance, what? ...
Talk to him a bit.... See what he says and let me know. It is not
difficult."
"No, citizen."
Mole helped the suffering wretch into his bath. Not a movement, not a
quiver of the eyelid betrayed one single emotion which he may have
felt- -neither loathing nor sympathy, only placid indifference. He was
just a half-starved menial, thankful to accomplish any task for the sake
of satisfying a craving stomach. Marat stretched out his shrunken limbs
in the herbal water with a sigh of well-being.
"And the ring, citizen?" Mole suggested presently.
The demagogue held up his left hand--it was emaciated and disfigured
by disease. A cheap-looking metal ring, set with a false stone, glistened
upon the fourth finger.

"Take it off," he