A woman living in that street cried out: “It is as those two say! I’ll follow the Merlins who taught the children so well!”
Espérance stretched out her arms. “O friends, we have had enough of smiting! They are as helpless as are children!”
Paris gathered here in this street let those endangered go; let them enter the house where the Merlins lived. There, at the top of the house, during that week’s madness, they stayed obscure, unharmed; at the end of it got somehow from Paris, to the frontier, over the frontier.
Jean and Espérance Merlin dosed their school. In Paris lay Freedom, wounded in her own house....
The two were of the months that followed and not of them. They were of the Revolution, but not of the anger, revenge, and fear that wove the ugly garment. Long since they had themselves worn the ugly garment. Shreds and patches of it might yet cling, and in times of inner weakness burn like the Nessus weave it was. But as a whole they wore it not; their being had discarded it.
In this time and place they were not Jacobin, they hardly seemed Girondin. To the unaided eye they did not plot nor plan. They went about, and it seemed that they were concerned only with helping individual wretchedness. Perhaps they themselves saw something further and wider than the immediate and individual....
A power that was simple and strong, direct and friendly, became a raft to sustain them in the boiling sea of the here and now. Infuriated men and women, men and women gnawed by suspicion of all neighbours and things, even, it might seem, of picture and statue and of the moving air, yet trusted them and let them pass. Mad Paris that tore its own flesh tore not them. They stayed many months in this trebly-fevered world. All that might be perceived was that a few minds caught from them calm and reflection, followed them into insight.
Winter, and the red robe showed redder yet, and the black shadows blacker yet. Now the guillotine took toll, took toll, took toll. Spring with her bright laughter, but the earth more maddened, more terror-struck; summer, and the wild pace heightened....
Jean and Espérance sat in a starlight night upon that bit of level roof just without their attic door. They leaned against the parapet, they looked afar and downward.
“Fear and hate and love and courage—all in the alembic! See the red, the green, the blue—the lion, the rose, the lily.... Salamander, sylph, undine and gnome—the beast and the human one and the god walking free....”