“You are right, Jacques,” said the frenzied cripple. “We Frochards come of a race that kills!”
The adversaries feinted around each other in circles, in the Latin mode of fighting that was their heritage. Coats or sidesteps 127 parried or evaded blows. The knives gleamed, but did not go quickly home.
If Jacques had the superior strength, Pierre was the more cat-like. His frail body was a slight target, so that the other’s great lunges missed. Then, leaping like a puma, he was behind and under Jacques’ guard, and stabbed him in the back.
The great hulk of a man fell back into La Frochard’s arms, the blood oozing from a cut that was not mortal though fearsome. The hag-mother wailed and crooned as if he were in death agony.
“Quick!” cried the hunchback to Louise, “the road to liberty is open.” Taking Louise by the hand, he ran with her up the steps out of the cellar....
But Henriette did not meet––not until one fateful hour––the itinerant grinder and her loved sister whom he protected. They were in many of the scenes of the later Revolution. Louise ate off the de Vaudrey plate, and Pierre perforce sharpened the knives of the September Massacre. Tramps of the boiling, tempestuous City, spectators but not participants of the great events, they looked ceaselessly for her.
Nor did the wicked Frochards abide in the den of Louise’s imprisonment and sufferings. They too were swallowed up in the vast maelstrom––to reappear at one ludicrous moment of tragic times.