“Of everything, I suppose, since there is nothing they can bring against me.”
“I heard you were intending to emigrate with the ci-devant Marquis de Fontenay.”
“Emigrate? I never thought of such a thing. We were going to Spain to see my father, who is there.”
“Well, citoyenne, I shall give orders for your trial to come on at once before the tribunal. If the citoyen Fontenay is not guilty you are not either. In consequence you will be able to go on and see your father at Madrid.”
“Good God!” cried Térèzia; “appear before your tribunal! But I am condemned beforehand! A poor creature who is the daughter of a count, the wife of a marquis, with a hand like this, which has never done any work but prepare lint for the wounded of the 10th of August.”
“You are wrong, citoyenne, to doubt the justice of the tribunal, we have not created it to assassinate in the name of the law, but to avenge the republic and proclaim innocence.”
He spoke in the pompous jargon of the Revolution, the language of his paper, L’Ami des Citoyens. Then turning to the gaoler he sent him away upon a message. When the door had closed behind the spy of his party, in whose presence even he himself dared not speak freely, he took the hand of Térèzia and said in a gentle voice—
“We are not tyrants.”
To which astounding assertion she replied in those terms of flattery in which alone it was safe to address the individuals who “were not tyrants,” and whose motto was “Liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
“I suppose he who writes so eloquently in L’Ami des Citoyens is also the friend of the citoyennes? If you are my friend, for the sake of the citoyenne, Lameth, [98] do not make me appear before that odious tribunal, on which you do not sit.”