"Where are the agents of the Committee of Public Safety? Men have been thrown into prison for less than this."
"Shame!"
"Denounce him!"
"Take him to the nearest Section!"
"Ere he wreaks mischief more lasting than words!" cried a woman, who tried as she spoke to give to her utterance its full, sinister meaning.
"Shame! Treason!" came soon from every side. Voices were raised all down the length of the tables—shrill, full-throated, even dull and indifferent. Some really felt indignation—burning, ferocious indignation; others only made a noise for the sheer pleasure of it, and because the past five years had turned cries of "Treason!" and of "Shame!" into a habit. Not that they knew what the disturbance was about. The street was long and narrow, and the cries came some way from where they were sitting; but when cries of "Treason!" flew through the air these days, 'twas best to join in, lest those cries turned against one, and the next stage in the proceedings became the approach of an Agent of the Sûreté, the nearest prison, and the inevitable guillotine.
So every one cried, "Shame!" and "Treason!" whilst those who had first dared to raise their voices against the popular demagogue drew together into a closer hatch, trying no doubt to gather courage through one another's proximity. Eager, excited, a small compact group of two men—one a mere boy—and three women, it almost seemed as if they were suffering from some temporary hallucination. How else would five isolated persons—three of them in their first youth—have dared to brave a multitude?
In truth Bertrand Moncrif, face to face as he believed with martyrdom, was like one transfigured. Always endowed with good looks, he appeared like a veritable young prophet, haranguing the multitude and foretelling its doom. The gloom partly hid his figure, but his hand was outstretched, and the outline of an avenging finger pointing straight out before him, appeared in the weird light of the resin torch, as if carved in glowing lava. Now and then the fitful light caught the sharp outline of his face—the straight nose and pointed chin, and brown hair matted with the sweat of enthusiasm.
Beside him Régine, motionless and white as a wraith, appeared alive only by her eyes, which were fixed on her beloved. In the hulking giant with the asthmatic cough she had recognised the man to whom she had ministered earlier in the day. Somehow, his presence here and now seemed to her sinister and threatening. It seemed as if all day he had been dogging her footsteps; first at the soothsayer's, then he surely must have followed her down the street. Then he had inspired her with pity; now his hideous face, his grimy hands, that croaking voice and churchyard cough, filled her with nameless terror.
He appeared to her excited fancy like a veritable spectre of death, hovering over Bertrand and over those she loved. With one arm she tried to press her brother Jacques closer to her breast, to quench his eagerness and silence his foolhardy tongue. But he, like a fierce, impatient young animal, fought to free himself from her loving embrace, shouted approval to Bertrand's oratory, played his part of young propagandist, heedless of Régine's warning and of his mother's tears. Next to Régine, her sister Joséphine—a girl not out of her 'teens, with all the eagerness and exaggeration of extreme youth, was shouting quite as loudly as her brother Jacques, clapping her small hands together, turning glowing, defying, arrogant eyes on the crowd of great unwashed whom she hoped to sway with her ardour and her eloquence.