“It is false.”
“If it be false, Citizen Déroulède,” continued the other with the same unctuous suavity, “then how comes it that the correspondence which you admit was treasonable, and therefore presumably secret—how comes it that it was found, still smouldering, in the chaste young woman’s bedroom, and the torn letter-case concealed among her dresses in a valise?”
“It is false.”
“The Minister of Justice, Citizen-Deputy Merlin, will answer for the truth of that.”
“It is the truth,” said Juliette quietly.
Her voice rang out clear, almost triumphant, in the midst of the breathless pause, caused by the previous swift questions and loud answers.
Déroulède now was silent.
This one simple fact he did not know. Anne Mie, in telling him the events in connection with the arrest of Juliette, had omitted to give him the one little detail, that the burnt letters were found in the young girl’s bedroom.
Up to the moment when the Public Prosecutor confronted him with it, he had been under the impression that she had destroyed the papers and the letter-case in the study, where she had remained alone after Merlin and his men had left the room. She could easily have burnt them there, as a tiny spirit lamp was always kept alight on a side table for the use of smokers.
This little fact now altered the entire course of events. Tinville had but to frame an indignant ejaculation:
“Citizens of France, see how you are being befooled and hoodwinked!”
Then he turned once more to Déroulède.
“Citizen Déroulède—” he began.
But in the tumult that ensued he could no longer hear his own voice. The pent-up rage of the entire mob of Paris seemed to find vent for itself in the howls with which the crowd now tried to drown the rest of the proceedings.
As their brutish hearts had been suddenly melted on behalf of Juliette, in response to Déroulède’s passionate appeal, so now they swiftly changed their sympathetic attitude to one of horror and execration.
Two people had fooled and deceived them. One of these they had reverenced and trusted, as much as their degraded minds were capable of reverencing anything, therefore his sin seemed doubly damnable.
He and that paleface aristocrat had for weeks now, months, or years perhaps, conspired against the Republic, against the Revolution, which had been made by a people thirsting for liberty. During these months and years he had talked to them, and they had listened; he had poured forth treasures of eloquence, cajoled them, as he had done just now.
The noise and hubbub were growing apace. If Tinville and Merlin had desired to infuriate the mob, they had more than succeeded. All that was most bestial, most savage in this awful Parisian populace rose to the surface now in one wild, mad desire for revenge.
The crowd rushed down from the benches, over one another’s heads, over children’s fallen bodies; they rushed down because they wanted to get at him, their whilom favourite, and at his palefaced mistress, and tear them to pieces, hit them, scratch out their eyes. They snarled like so many wild beasts, the women shrieked, the children cried, and the men of the National Guard, hurrying forward, had much ado to keep back this flood-tide of hate.
Had any of them broken loose, from behind the barrier of bayonets hastily raised against them, it would have fared ill with Déroulède and Juliette.
The President wildly rang his bell, and his voice, quivering with excitement, was heard once or twice above the din.
“Clear the court! Clear the court!”
But the people refused to be cleared out of court.
“À la lanterne les traîtres! Mort à Déroulède. À la lanterne! l’aristo!”
And in the thickest of the crowd, the broad shoulders and massive head of Citizen Lenoir towered above the others.
At first it seemed as if he had been urging on the mob in its fury. His strident voice, with its broad provincial accent, was heard distinctly shouting loud vituperations against the accused.
Then at a given moment, when the tumult was at its height, when the National Guard felt their bayonets giving way before this onrushing tide of human jackals, Lenoir changed his tactics.
“Tiens! c’est bête!” he shouted loudly, “we shall do far better with the traitors when we get them outside. What say you, citizens? Shall we leave the judges here to conclude the farce, and arrange for its sequel ourselves outside the ‘Tigre Jaune’?”
At first but little heed was paid to his suggestion, and he repeated it once or twice, adding some interesting details:
“One is freer in the streets, where these apes of the National Guard can’t get between the people of France and their just revenge. Ma foi!” he added, squaring his broad shoulders, and pushing his way through the crowd towards the door, “I for one am going to see where hangs the most suitable lanterne.”
Like a flock of sheep the crowd now followed him.
“The nearest lanterne!” they shouted. “In the streets—in the streets! À la lanterne! The traitors!”
And with many a jeer, many a loathsome curse, and still more loathsome jests, some of the crowd began to file out. A few only remained to see the conclusion of the farce.
XXVI
Sentence of Death
The Bulletin du Tribunal Révolutionnaire tells us that both the accused had remained perfectly calm during the turmoil which raged within the bare walls of the Hall of Justice.
Citizen-Deputy Déroulède, however, so the chroniclers aver, though outwardly impassive, was evidently deeply moved. He had very expressive eyes, clear mirrors of the fine, upright soul within, and in them there was a look of intense emotion as he watched the crowd, which he had so often dominated and controlled, now turning in hatred against him.
He seemed actually to be seeing with a spiritual vision, his own popularity wane and die.
But when the thick of the crowd had pushed and jostled itself out of the hall, that transient
