"To the Abbaye, citoyens, to the Abbaye! The tyrants are being exterminated. The justice of the people is beginning! To the Abbaye! To the Abbaye!"
Behind the frenzied boy there fell a silence, and the crowd, in a sudden, senseless panic, retreated indoors.
"The Abbaye!" Nicole cried in consternation. "And Dossonville! We must hurry there."
A baker's wife, seeing them hastening on, cried:
"Are you going to the Abbaye, citoyennes? Is there any danger?"
"Not for us."
"Wait, I'll join you."
A cobbler made a fourth, then two apprentices from a cloth-merchant attached themselves, then a fishwife and a tow-headed newsboy. As they crossed the Seine the crowd increased, while horrid figures of depravity and suffering, vermin of Paris, broke past them. Cutlasses and pikes appeared, and from the panting throng shouts burst out:
"Death to the traitors!"