At this point Charlotte, whose temper was not improved by such discourses, abruptly left them. They heard the sharp hurrying of her footsteps cross the flags of the courtyard; she was going up to her own room overlooking the street. Fouché smiled.
"You smile, Fouché," said Robespierre, displaying very obvious irritation, "because you think, as politicians do, that war is an unaccountable thing. Let me tell you that reason here is much stronger than chance, and that the forces opposed to us are already convinced of liberty. I have before me" (he pulled out his little brown book from his pocket) "a list of pamphlets recently distributed beyond the frontiers, and a very good estimate of the numbers of their readers."
Fouché restrained his smile; he was a man capable of self-control to any limit. He leant his long, delicate, refined head upon the tapering fingers of his left hand, and listened with great apparent interest to what the Master was saying. The sawing in the courtyard without ceased, and his host, the carpenter, entered in that reverential way which marks the sentiment of religion, and very silently took a distant chair to listen to the Master's discourse. Couthon shifted himself in his place to relieve his crippled members, and Robespierre continued—
"Nothing endures unless it be based upon Virtue, but though Virtue tends to corrupt with time, and though Liberty is rather for what the fanatics have called 'angels' than for men, yet if men's chains are broken it has great chance of permanence and of effect upon the public. I have upon this matter," he continued, pulling out of a pocket a shagreen case and from that case a pair of spectacles, "certain notes that will not be without interest for you."
Fouché sighed while Robespierre was seeking among a group of neatly-folded papers for what he had to read. His host, the carpenter, bent forward to hear as a man might bend forward to hear the reading of the Gospel. He even had an odd instinct to stand up and listen with bowed head. St. Just was thinking of other things. And certainly any modern man looking on would have been compelled to watch St. Just's deep and luminous eyes. He had already forgotten the future, and once again he was thinking of the wars. He had begun to take pleasure in the charges. A moment might have made him, from the poet that he was, a soldier; and while the high thin voice of the little man Robespierre went on with appropriate gestures, describing the permanence of Virtue in a free State, he clearly saw what he had seen but a few days before from the lines: the houses of the beleaguered city against the June dawn, and he heard the bugles.
Robespierre had begun: "The sentiment of property which is native in man proceeds from what he gives to Nature by his toil, and this is respected by all, yet even property itself cannot be thought secure until Virtue be there to guarantee it, no laws can make up for its absence. It is Virtue, therefore, upon which even this essential, without which society cannot be, reposes. And Virtue which will cause a poor man to be equal with the rich, while the one regards the other without envy upon the one side, without contempt upon the other."
For a full quarter of an hour Robespierre went on, and Couthon, as a matter of ritual, and the master of the house as a matter of religion, listened: the one as a matter of course, the other ardently. And when he had finished his little peroration, when he had taken off those spectacles and wiped them, when he had turned upon them his pale, small, watchful, grey-green eyes, he noted that Fouché alone had been inconstant. Fouché had his back turned and was looking out of a window. A boy who passed through the courtyard whistling, carrying a short ladder, looked at the window for a moment and saw the aquiline, refined face covered with laughter. The boy thought that laughter merely friendly. He waved his hand and smiled an answer, and Fouché saw in that boy the generation that should arise. He composed his features and turned them once more towards the room. Before Robespierre could speak sharply, as he meant to speak, and complain of such inattention, he said in a clear, well-modulated voice, that he had never heard those sentences before. Was Robespierre to pronounce them that day in Parliament?
"I shall do so," said Robespierre, "if I am permitted by the President to speak. If not, I will reserve my remarks for another occasion." He pulled out a fat little round watch prettily enamelled, touched the lace at his wrists, settled the order of his stock, and said as a schoolmaster might say it to young St. Just: "Are you not coming with me?"
St. Just, startled suddenly like a man awakened, thought of the hour, remembered the Parliament, and went out with his friend.
Fouché with his hand to his chin crossed the courtyard and went up the stairs to that part of the house which overlooked the Rue St. Honoré. He had something to say to Charlotte. Couthon, who was hungry, remained to lunch, but he found his hosts dull and a little ill-tempered. He could not fill the void that had been left by Robespierre.