The next moment I was in the street.
* * * * * * *
Who was my little citoyenne? Ah! I shall never know. The terror gripped us, and these things passed. Incidents that would make the passion of sober times, the spirit of revolution dismisses with a shrug. To die in those days was such a vulgar complaint.
But I saw her once more, and then when my heart nestled to her image and my veins throbbed to her remembered touch.
I was strolling, on the morning following my strange experience, in the neighbourhood of the Champs Elysées, when I was aware of a great press of people all making in the direction of that open ground.
“What arrives, then, citizen?” I cried to one who paused for breath near me.
He gasped, the little morose. To ask any question that showed one ignorant of the latest caprice of the Executive was almost to be “suspect.”
“Has not the citizen heard? The Committee of Safety has decreed the destruction of the dogs.”
“The dogs?”
“Sacred Blood!” he cried. “Is it not time, when they take, as it is said they did last night, a good friend of the Republic to supper?”