"Yes! I know that to my cost. My sister's house is next door to it. At night the street is not safe for decent females to be abroad: and though there is a platoon of Marats on guard at Le Bouffay close by, they do nothing to free the neighbourhood of that pest."
"Bah!" retorted Carrier with cynical indifference, "they have more important quarry to net. Rebels and traitors swarm in Nantes, what? Commandant Fleury has had no time hitherto to waste on mere cut-throats, although I had thoughts before now of razing the place to the ground. Citizen Lamberty has his lodgings on the other side and he does nothing but complain of the brawls that go on there o' nights. Sure it is that while a stone of the Rat Mort remains standing all the night-hawks of Nantes will congregate around it and brew mischief there which is no good to me and no good to the Republic."
"Yes! I know all about the Rat Mort. I found a night's shelter there four years ago when...."
"When the ci-devant duc de Kernogan was busy hanging your father—the miller—for a crime which he never committed. Well then, citizen Martin-Roget," continued Carrier with one of his hideous leers, "since you know the Rat Mort so well what say you to your fair and stately Yvonne de Kernogan and her father being captured there in the company of the lowest scum of the population of Nantes?"
"You mean ...?" murmured Martin-Roget, who had become livid with excitement.
"I mean that my Marats have orders to raid some of the haunts of our Nantese cut-throats, and that they may as well begin to-night and with the Rat Mort. They will make a descent on the house and a thorough perquisition, and every person—man, woman and child—found on the premises will be arrested and sent with a batch of malefactors to Paris, there to be tried as felons and criminals and deported to Cayenne where they will, I trust, rot as convicts in that pestilential climate. Think you," concluded the odious creature with a sneer, "that when put face to face with the alternative, your Kernogan wench will still refuse to become the wife of a fine patriot like yourself?"
"I don't know," murmured Martin-Roget. "I ... I...."
"But I do know," broke in Carrier roughly, "that ten thousand francs is far too little to pay for so brilliant a realisation of all one's hopes. Ten thousand francs? 'Tis an hundred thousand you should give to show your gratitude."
Martin-Roget rose and stretched his large, heavy figure to its full height. He was at great pains to conceal the utter contempt which he felt for the abominable wretch before whom he was forced to cringe.
"You shall have ten thousand francs, citizen Carrier," he said slowly; "it is all that I possess in the world now—the last remaining fragment of a sum of twenty-five thousand francs which I earned and scraped together for the past four years. You have had five thousand francs already. And you shall have the other ten. I do not grudge it. If twenty years of my life were any use to you, I would give you that, in exchange for the help you are giving me in what means far more than life to me."