Those who repeated her remarks exclaimed in apprehension and tapped their foreheads. As a natural consequence, the most extraordinary rumors arose. One declared that she had been seen thrice at midnight prowling about the vicinity of the scaffold. Another affirmed that he on whom she looked with anger would perish. Others, scorning these absurd rumors, gave it as their opinion that her mind was shaken by her unnatural obsession. The girl did not fail to notice the change in the demeanor of her companions, and, in her tortured imagination, ascribed to it a different cause.
"Why do they draw away from me?" she said once.
"It's your imagination."
"Are you superstitious?" she said disjointedly.
"I? A little."
"Why do they call me the daughter of the guillotine? Doesn't that strike you as odd?"
And she threw upon her companion a quick, cunning glance, as though to surprise the momentary confusion that would expose her real knowledge.
Thermidor began with the hecatombs from the pretended Conspiracy of the Prisons, and the transfer of the guillotine to the Barrière du Trône Renversé. The great rolling biers, attended by the scum of the city, bore each day to the scaffold their thirty, forty, sixty victims. Even the Faubourg St. Antoine, satiated and appalled, began to grumble, while from time to time voices broke out in protestation, willing from mere lassitude to end the spectacle by their own sacrifice.
On the 6th of Thermidor, almost at the side of Louison, a bouquetière, her comrade, cried out:
"I am sick of it! Robespierre is a scoundrel. They kill too many people. I want to die."