A DAUGHTER OF THE GIRONDE
In a room on the second floor of a house in the Rue Favart in Paris—a large room scantily and untidily furnished—a man sat reading by the light of an oil lamp. The hour was late, the night a July night in the year 1794—year two of the Republic. The house already slumbered round him; the sounds of Paris rose to his ears softened by night and distance. Intent on his work, he looked up from time to time to make a note; or, drawing the lamp a little nearer he trimmed its wick and set it back. When this happened, the light falling strongly on his face, and bringing into relief its harsh lines and rugged features, showed him to be a man past middle life, grey-haired, severe, almost forbidding of aspect.
Peaceful as his occupation seemed, there was something in the air of the room which suggested change, even danger. The floor was littered with packing cases and with books piled together at random. On the low bedstead lay a travelling cloak; on the table, by the reader's hand, lay a pistol and beside it one of the huge sabres which were then in fashion. Nor were these signs without meaning. The man reading on, wrapt and unconscious, in his upper room, merely followed his bent. He read and reasoned, though in the great city round him the terror of the Revolution was at its height; though the rattle of the drum had scarcely ceased with nightfall, and the last tumbril was even now being wheeled back into its shed.
For men grow strangely callous. The danger which impends daily and every day ceases to be feared. Achille Mirande had seen the chiefs of his party fall round him. He had seen Pétion and Barbaroux, Louvet and Vergniaud die—the Girondins who had dreamed with him of a republic of property, free and yet law-abiding. Nor had his experiences stopped there. He had seen his foes perish also, the Hébertists first and later the Dantonists. But for himself—death seemed to have passed him by. Danger had become second nature; the very rumbling of the tumbrils passing his house on the way to the guillotine had ceased to be anything but annoying; until to-day, to avoid the interruption, he had left his house in the Rue St. Honoré and established himself in this empty flat in the little Rue Favart.
By-and-by he laid down the book he was reading and fell into deep meditation. As he sat thus, alone and silent in the silent room, a sound, which a keener ear would have noticed before, attracted his attention. Startled in a degree by it, he roused himself; he looked round. "A rat, I suppose," he muttered. Yet he continued to peer with suspicion into the corner whence the sound had come, and presently he heard it again. The next instant he sprang to his feet; phantom-like a door in the panelled wall at the back of the room—a door in the wall where there should have been no door—was swinging, nay, had swung open. While he glared at it, hardly believing his senses, a man appeared standing in the dark aperture.
The man was young and of middle height. Dazzled by the light, and suffering apparently from weakness, he paused, leaning for support against the doorway. His eyes were bright, his sunken cheeks told of fever or famine. His clothes stained and dusty, and his unkempt hair, added to the wildness of his appearance. For a moment he and the owner of the room glared at one another in speechless wonder. Then a name sprang to the lips of each.
"Monsieur Mirande!" the younger man muttered.