“What if you are killed?” St. Just replied calmly. “I should not know whither you came.”
“True,” I replied; and he taking out his tablets, wrote upon them, from my dictation, the address of the Citizen Duplay.
In this act may be seen an example of that forethought and preparation which gave St. Just a position to which otherwise he never would have attained.
“Good!” he said, having carefully taken down every particular. “Go forward.”
How necessary was his precaution, the next few minutes showed.
We had only reached the end of the Rue St. Anne, when a sudden rush of people along the Rue Neuve des Augustins warned us that danger was at hand.
I turned and looked at St. Just.
Without regarding me, while apparently his sight was on the alert on all sides, he repeated his direction, “Go forward.”
Suddenly, shots were heard, and, in a few moments, the street surged with people, who poured out from the houses and joined those who were speeding down the street, running by their sides and asking what the commotion meant. So far, very few of the citizens were aware of the massacres that had taken place upon the altar of the country.
Paris, in fact, was that day, for the first time, wholly shadowed by the red flag—which was not to be furled again until a reign of terror, never equalled in the history of the world, was to be followed by the inauguration of Napoleon’s splendor.