“Stop!” he cried; “I know that woman.”
He did not, in fact, recognise her at all, but he wished to save her. Turning to the crowd, he said—
“If she is guilty she belongs to justice. But you are too magnanimous to strike an unarmed enemy, above all, a woman.”
Just then Lacomb, president of the tribunal, who had been told that the aristocrats who went with the English captain were saved by her, came up and ordered her arrest.
At the same time Tallien recognised the Marquise de Fontenay.
Térèzia, therefore, found herself in one of the horrible prisons of that Revolution whose progress she had done everything in her power to assist. In the darkness and gloom of its dungeon she afterwards declared that the rats had bitten her feet.
In a very short time, however, she was summoned out of the prison and conducted by the gaolers into the presence of Tallien.
In the fearful tragedy of the French Revolution, as in many earlier dramas in the history of that nation, one can hardly fail to be struck by the extreme youth of many, perhaps most, of the leading characters, good or bad. And the hero and heroine of this act in the revolutionary drama were young, and both remarkable for their beauty.
Tallien, the member of the Assembly, the blood-stained popular leader, the pro-consul before whom every one trembled in Bordeaux, was five-and-twenty. The Marquise de Fontenay, who stood before him, knowing that her life was in his hands, was not yet twenty.