A murmur succeeded her outcry. The president, white to the ears, stilled it with uplifted hand. He looked a moment at the young Royalist, a bitter stiff smile on his lips.
“It is just!” he cried in a sudden thin voice. “This is no time to dally, as the demoiselle Théroigne informs us. Conduct all the prisoners into the yard.”
The order had not passed his lips when there came a splintering crash, and in an instant the whole room was in roaring racket and confusion. Some half of the prisoners, forereading their certain doom, had made a desperate plunge for escape through the rearward window by which they stood. They got clear away. Their less prompt, or fortunate, companions were in the same moment surrounded and isolated each from each.
Suleau lifted his voice above the din.
“Commit me, my friends, to the sacrifice. Perhaps my blood, which, it seems, they most desire, will appease their fury!”
He struggled to throw himself towards the door. His motive misunderstood, a half-dozen sans-culottes flung themselves upon and pinioned him in their arms. At the same instant Théroigne leapt like a cat and seized him by his collar.
“At last!” she hissed in his ear. “Dost thou know me?”
“Thou art Théroigne!” he panted. He had caught the president’s words. He understood now something of the reason of this woman’s violence.
“Ah!” she cried in a hurried fury of speech, “and has not my time come, thou dog with a false name, thou nameless cur, so to slander and revile the woman thou drovest to ruin?”
They were slowly edging him towards the door. He could only shake his head at her.