The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel | Page 2

at the height of his popularity and of his
power. The two great Committees of Public Safety and of General
Security were swayed by his desires, the Clubs worshipped him, the
Convention was packed with obedient slaves to his every word. The
Dantonists, cowed into submission by the bold coup which had sent
their leader, their hero, their idol, to the guillotine, were like a tree that
has been struck at the root. Without Danton, the giant of the Revolution,
the collossus of crime, the maker of the Terror, the thunderbolt of the
Convention, the part was atrophied, robbed of its strength and its
vitality, its last few members hanging, servile and timorous, upon the
great man's lips.
Robespierre was in truth absolute master of France. The man who had
dared to drag his only rival down to the scaffold was beyond the reach
of any attack. By this final act of unparalleled despotism he had
revealed the secrets of his soul, shown himself to be rapacious as well
as self-seeking. Something of his aloofness, of his incorruptibility, had
vanished, yielding to that ever-present and towering ambition which
hitherto none had dared to suspect. But ambition is the one vice to
which the generality of mankind will always accord homage, and

Robespierre, by gaining the victory over his one in the Convention, in
the Clubs and in the Committees, had tacitly agreed to obey. The tyrant
out of his vaulting ambition had brought forth the slaves.
Faint hearted and servile, they brooded over their wrongs, gazed with
smouldering wrath on Danton's vacant seat in the Convention, which
no one cared to fill. But they did not murmur, hardly dared to plot, and
gave assent to every decree, every measure, every suggestion
promulgated by the dictator who held their lives in the hollow of his
thin white hand; who with a word, a gesture, could send his enemy, his
detractor, a mere critic of his actions, to the guillotine.
Chapter II
: Feet of Clay
1
On this 26th day of April, 1794, which in the newly constituted
calendar is the 7th Floreal, year II of the Republic, three women and
one man were assembled in a small, closely curtained room on the top
floor of a house in the Rue de la Planchette, which is situated in a
remote and dreary quarter of Paris. The man sat upon a chair which was
raised on a dais. He was neatly, indeed immaculately, dressed, in dark
cloth coat and tan breeches, with clean linen at throats and wrists, white
stockings and buckled shoes. His own hair was concealed under a
mouse-coloured wig. He sat quite still, with one leg crossed over the
other, and his thin, bony hands were clasped in front of him.
Behind the dais there was a heavy curtain which stretched right across
the room, and in front of it, at opposite corners, two young girls, clad in
grey, clinging draperies, sat upon their heels, with the palms of their
hands resting flat upon their thighs. Their hair hung loose down their
backs, their chins were uplifted, their eyes fixed, their bodies rigid in an
attitude of contemplation. In the centre of the room a woman stood,
gazing upwards at the ceiling, her arms folded across her breast. Her
grey hair, lank and unruly, was partially hidden by an ample floating
veil of an indefinite shade of grey, and from her meagre shoulders and

arms, her garment - it was hardly a gown - descended in straight, heavy,
shapeless folds. In front of her was a small table, on it a large crystal
globe, which rested on a stand of black wood, exquisitely carved and
inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and beside it a small metal box.
Immediately above the old woman's head an oil lamp, the flame of
which was screened by a piece of crimson silk, shed a feeble and lurid
light upon the scene. Against the wall half a dozen chairs, on the floor a
threadbare carpet, and in one corner a broken-down chiffonier
represented the sum total of the furniture in the stuffy little room. The
curtains in front of the window, as well as the portières which masked
both the doors, were heavy and thick, excluding all light and most of
the outside air.
The old woman, with eyes fixed upon the ceiling, spoke in a dull, even
monotone.
"Citizen Robespierre, who is the Chosen of the Most High, hath
deigned to enter the humble abode of his servant," she said. "What is
his pleasure to-day?"
"The shade of Danton pursues me," Robespierre replied, and his voice
too sounded toneless, as if muffled by the heavily weighted atmosphere.
"Can you not lay him to rest?"
The woman stretched out her arms. The folds of her woollen draperies
hung