LITMIR.BIZ

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      The Baron leapt up with flaming eyes. 'Do you mock?'

      André-Louis shook his head. 'I do not mock. I view the ruin, the futile ruin of a sweet young life. It was to save a queen, you said. I told you that no good would come of it.'

      Livid, de Batz swung away from him. 'I spoke of more than the Queen. But why argue? You have moved too slowly with your infernal caution.'

      'That is unjust. I was spurred to swiftest movement in the hope of precipitating the avalanche in time to save Léopoldine.'

      'Léopoldine! Léopoldine! Can you think of nothing else? Not even the fate of the Queen of France can eclipse her from your thoughts. What do I care for all the Léopoldines in the world, when that anointed head may fall unless I can work a miracle! And that fat fool at Hamm will mock again; will call me a Gascon and a boaster.'

      'Does that matter? Is your vanity to be concerned?'

      'It is a question of my honour,' de Batz fiercely retorted.

      Thereafter for a week he scarcely ate or slept, and was seldom at his lodging in the Rue de Ménars. He scoured the city. He hunted out his army of loyal associates. He held conferences, propounded plans, each more reckless than the other for the deliverance of the unhappy Queen. Rougeville, one of his associates, even claimed thereafter to have penetrated the Conciergerie and to have spoken with her Majesty in an attempt to prepare the ground for an evasion. But all was vain. There was not even the forlorn hope of delivering her by some such desperate attempt on the road to the Place de la Révolution as that by which nine months ago he had proposed to save the King. Those were early days, and after all the King had still some friends even among the Republicans, whereas the Queen, thanks to the infamous propaganda that had been steadily at work, was universally execrated.

      That propaganda was to continue industrious to the end. There are no limits to the invention by which men seek to justify the wrong they do. Hitherto they had been content to brand this poor tarnished queen as a Messalina. But not even this was enough for the foul mind of Hébert.

      Her trial, lasting two days, closed with the death sentence at four o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, the 16th of October. Some hours later she set out in the tumbril, dressed all in white, her hands pinioned behind her. From the mob-cap with which she was coiffed escaped the ragged ends of the grey hair rudely cropped by the executioner's valet in the course of the last toilet. But she sat erect, disdainful, her heavy Austrian lip protruding, in scorn of the loathly rabble that booed her as she passed to her death.

      It was an imposing last procession. All Paris was under arms. The drums rolled. Thirty thousand troops of foot and horse had turned out, and lined the route. Cannon was mounted at every commanding point. Did she contrast it with that other procession, twenty-three years ago, in which, as the lovely young Archduchess of fifteen, she had first come among these people, who then, as now, and yet in what different sentiment, had yelled themselves hoarse at sight of her?

      De Batz, a man anguished and almost demented, was in the crowd to hear the shouts of 'Death to tyrants! Live the Republic!' which greeted the fall of that royal head.

      Disordered in mind as in appearance he came back to the Rue de Ménars and to André-Louis, who had abstained from going forth that day. But not on that account had he remained either ignorant of or indifferent to what was taking place. He rose as de Batz entered.

      'So. It is finished,' he said quietly.

      Out of the Baron's livid face a pair of flaming, blood-injected eyes regarded him in fury.

      'Finished? No. It is about to begin. What you have heard from here was but the overture. It is time to ring up the curtain. Time to make an end.'

      His self-control had completely left him. He had the air of a drunkard or a madman, and he raved like one. He reviled all things, beginning with himself and ending with the people. It shamed him, he declared, that the same blood should run in his veins as in the veins of these tigers. They were vile as no people in the world ever had been or ever could be vile. They were inhuman, bestial imbeciles. But they should soon be brought to their senses. Even to such sub-human wits as theirs the corruption of their masters in the Convention should be made apparent. Their passions, so easily inflamed, should be inflamed, indeed, so as to consume the evil satyrs who were responsible for this horror. All these, he swore, should go the way the Queen had gone that morning.

      If André-Louis did not share his stormy emotions, he certainly shared his resolve. Because he remained cold and self-contained, he was in fact, as he had always been, as he would be to the end, the deadlier of the two.

      There followed days of watchful waiting for the moment to ring up the curtain on the drama of which he had so craftily prepared the scenario.

      First came, less than a fortnight later, the mockery of a trial of the twenty-two Girondins, who had languished in prison since last June. Robespierre judged that the hour for this had struck. It would drive home the assertion that the party of the Mountain, of which he was the undisputed head, was now the paramount party in the State. Their execution followed: a wholesale butchery this, providing in the Place de la Révolution a spectacle of blood on a scale not yet witnessed there.

      Yet it was a spectacle which restored to de Batz something of his old remorseless spirit. Almost he smiled even as, with a sigh, he said: 'Poor devils! All young, all able! But even as for their own advancement they did not hesitate to murder the King, so must their own murder be approved by all monarchists, since it must advance the cause of the monarchy. Saturn-like the Convention begins to devour its own children. It is upon this that we have depended. Let the work thus begun be pushed forward ruthlessly, until, when it is seen in the departments that the representatives themselves are being guillotined, none will be found to brave the danger of replacing them, and the Convention will be reduced to a handful of contemptible fellows to be used or to be brushed aside.' In a breath he added: 'Is the business of the India Company ripe yet?'

      'It is ripening fast,' André-Louis informed him. Already some days previously the commission had pronounced, upon the vote of the majority, that the extinction of the Company could not be countenanced, since it would be against the national interest. That finding, published unostentatiously, was already abroad, and confidence was being restored. 'The stock is rising again daily. Whether our friends have taken their profits or not scarcely matters. They have certainly made them. I am preparing now a memorial for some representative or other ambitious enough to bell the cat.'

      'Whom have you in mind?'

      'Philippeaux. There's a crude honesty about him. Also he is a moderate, and therefore a natural enemy of the extremist Chabot. I have sounded him in a casual way. I pointed out to him how odd a thing it is that so many members of the Convention have latterly become men of property. I asked him innocently what possible explanation there could be for this. He became angry. Used the word "calumny"; voiced a suspicion that rumours indicated the existence of a plot to bring the Convention into discredit.'

      'That was shrewd enough,' said de Batz.

      'I promised him particulars. I am preparing them.'

      He prepared them so well that the Representative Philippeaux, convinced, mounted the tribune of the Convention to cast a bombshell into the Assembly. This happened on a November morning a week later, and for the moment put an end to the discussion of abstract questions which had been occupying so much time since Danton's return from his uxorious retirement. The murder of the Girondins had been the immediate cause of his reappearance. That and the summons from his friend Desmoulins, who began to dread the daily increasing ascendancy of Robespierre. Danton, the man chiefly responsible for the butchery of the 10th of August, when the gutters had run with blood, was there now to preach in his powerful voice a gospel of moderation.

      It startled de Batz, who accounted the movement premature. At the same time, he perceived in it the beginnings of a counter-revolutionary tendency, and it confirmed the opinion he had long held that, when the time to use him came, he would find in Danton the man to play in France the part that Monk had played in England.

      And then, even whilst these things were engaging the Baron's attention,

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