"Look—she is pretty."
"Haven't the time."
Several, attracted by the exclamation, gave her a casual glance; the rest, without raising their heads, continued the low hum of their conference. From the farther side a man wrapped in blankets, deformed, infirm, seized with sudden chills, greeted her.
"Well, Nicole, you've come to denounce some one? That's right."
"Citoyen Couthon," Nicole blurted, "I—"
At the aspect of these machine-like men industriously busy with the lists that fed the guillotine, all her anger dissolved—she could not pronounce there the name she had loved.
"Well, well," Couthon said encouragingly, "you want to denounce whom? Come, let us get at it. Not the Citoyen Eugène Barabant, at least," he said, with a good-natured leer.
The sound of that name in this spot, without pity, terrified Nicole; she now sought only an excuse to retreat.
"What name's that?" cried a little man from the table. "Eugène Barabant? Wait a moment; wait a moment. Let me search."
Couthon lounged to the side of the speaker, who, turning to his neighbor, demanded the list of suspects to be arrested, while Nicole, flattened against the wall, dazed by a sudden fear, remained trembling at the snatches of conversation that reached her.