"Speak; what has he done?" replied Saint-Just; "Justice listens to you."
Then, in a voice full-of emotion, but strong, indignant, and menacing, the young girl related all the hideous drama—the death of her mother, her father's arrest, the scaffold reared before her house, the alternative which had been offered her; and at each terrible climax, to which Saint-Just listened without seeming able to credit them, she turned to the executioner, the assistants, the Hussars of Death, for confirmation; even to Schneider himself. And each one to whom she appealed replied: "Yes, it is true!" Except Schneider, who, crushed and crouching like a jaguar ready to spring, assented only by his silence.
Saint-Just, gnawing at his finger-tips, let her finish, and then, when she had ended, he said: "You ask justice, citizeness Brumpt, and you shall have it. But what would you have done if I had not been willing to grant it?"
She drew a dagger from her breast.
"To-night, in bed," she said, "I would have stabbed him. Charlotte Corday has taught us how to treat a Marat! But now," she added, "now that I am free to weep for my mother and to console my father, I ask mercy for that man."
At the word "mercy," Saint-Just started as if he had been bitten by a serpent.
"Mercy for him!" he cried, striking the railing of the balcony with his fist. "Mercy for this execrable man! mercy for the Monk of Cologne! You are jesting, young woman. If I should do that, Justice would spread her wings and fly away never to return. Mercy for him!" Then, in a terrible voice which was heard for a great distance around, he cried: "To the guillotine!"
The pale, thin, serious man got down from his cab, approached the balcony, and, taking off his hat with a bow, said: "Shall I behead him, citizen Saint-Just?"
"Unfortunately I have no right to order that; if I had, Humanity would be avenged within a quarter of an hour. No, as special commissioner he must appear before the revolutionary tribunal, and not before me. No, apply to him the torture he himself has invented; tie him to the guillotine. Shame here and death yonder!"
And with a gesture of supreme power he stretched out his arm toward Paris.