“Suleau!” And again, “Scélérat! Imposteur!”
He got upon a bench by a window that commanded a view of the court. This, he saw,—a wide, enclosed space,—was full of blue-coated soldiers. A posse of them made a present show of keeping the gates of the yard; but the gates themselves, significant to the true character of their defence, they had neglected to close. Beyond, in the road, and extending at least so far over the Thuilleries gardens as his view could compass, a packed congregation of patriots—quite typical savages—rested for a moment on its weapons. It listened, it appeared, to a commissary of the section, who, mounted on a tub by the gates, counselled methods judicial. A little space had been left about the orator, and now into this in an instant broke a woman—a wild vivandière, she seemed, of the new religious service of blood and wine—of the transubstantiation of Liberty. Without a moment’s hesitation she caught the commissary by a leg, and, hurling him to the ground, usurped his place. An exultant roar of applause shook the air. The poor deposed tribune, rubbing his bones, rose, and bolted for shelter. Suleau chuckled.
Now he did not know Théroigne; but he had laughed consumedly at her and her pseudo-classical pretensions in more than one Royalist print. He laughed at many things, did this Suleau—not sparing the gloom-distilling Jacobins, nor, in particular, Citizen Philip Egalité and his faction, of whom was Citizeness Lambertine; and he was so breezily headstrong, so romantically sworn to a picturesque cause, that he would not calculate the cost of pitting his wit against the vanity of a coryphée whose nod, in this height of her popularity, often confirmed a wavering sentence, whose smile rarely franked an acquittal. Besides, women—even the most foolish of them—like to be taken seriously.
This woman, it would seem, spoke vigorously, and entirely to the humour of her auditors. Only there appeared to prevail something rankly personal against himself, of all the twenty-two arrested, in her diatribe. He caught the sound of his own name uttered again and again to an accompaniment of oaths and execrations. This, at least, flattered him with the assurance that he had done something to earn the transcendent animosity of the many-headed.
“I present myself with an order of merit,” he murmured, gratified; and immediately he was summoned to his examination.
He was conducted between guards to the room of inquisition. In it he recognised many of his pre-indicted comrades in misfortune—twenty-one in all—huddled into a corner by a window. The room was otherwise crammed with soldiers, commissaries, and a few of the breechless. A thin man, in a state of palpable nervous excitement, sat behind a table. This was the Sieur Bonjour, first clerk of the Marines and President of the Section of the Feuillans. He opened upon the prisoner at once.
“It is useless to deny that you are Suleau, the Royalist pamphleteer.”
“Indeed,” replied the captive, with equal promptitude, “I would not so stultify monsieur’s fine perspicacity in discovering what I have never concealed.”
“Yet you disguise yourself in the garb of liberty.”
“No more than monsieur, surely.”