They never mistook that there was an angel underneath the red demon garb. They had been far in the world....
But in the autumn of 1792 Alteration stood fearful to look upon. Strongly, strongly was the angel imprisoned and straitened in the demon.
In August the prisons were choked. In September Paris grew blood-red.
Still Jean and Espérance Merlin kept their school together; still, before they slept, they sat upon the guarded roof with the stars above, the earth beneath; still through the free half of the day they went out into Paris. They saw the angel and the demon; knew that they could only know both because they were formed of both—and strove with incessancy to sublime the demon.
At last they could keep school no longer....
They came down into the street and heard the tocsin, as they had heard it for days before. A multitude was in the street. Hoof sound and wheel sound, and here was a carriage going heavily over the paving-stones. Behind it laboured a second and a third, “Non-jurant priests and Aristocrats going to prison—” One in the multitude flung a stone; others ran before the horses, made a wall that stopped them. The coachman flung down the reins, got from the boxes. Overhead the bells were making a wild and rapid sound. Red everywhere—and a sudden sprouting, like March points above the earth, of pike and sabre.
Those who had been crowded into the carriages came forth and stood in the street with blanched faces and a trembling of the limbs. There were men and there were women. “Citoyens, we, like you, have wished in our hearts to do right—”
“The liars!” cried a small man with a cutlass, and leaped upon one of the slighter prisoners. Frenzy loosened, shrieked.
The traces had been cut, the horses taken away. The threatened men and women pressed close to the carriage bodies, the wheels, finding here a momentary wall to stand against. The first, the second wall were dragged away, the prisoners massacred.
Jean and Espérance Merlin, coming into the street from their house, faced the third carriage and the miserable ones pressed against it.... The two made way through the shouting throng, stood before the prisoners. In the opposing and threatening mass, drawn from these by-streets, they saw more than one or two whose children they had taught. “Citoyens! Shall we be tyrants, slaying because it is not hard to slay? What value in the New if it be not more blissful-fearless than the Old! Wisdom in our hearts—mercy for these folk!”