Cournet opened the door.
"Off with you!" he said to them.
Huy and Lorrain jumped into the street and fled at the top of their speed.
The coachman had noticed nothing.
Cournet let them get away, and then, pulling the check string, stopped the fiacre, got down leisurely, reclosed the door, quietly took forty sous from his purse, gave them to the coachman, who had not left his seat, and said to him, "Drive on."
He plunged into Paris. In the Place des Victoires he met the ex-Constituent Isidore Buvignier, his friend, who about six weeks previously had come out of the Madelonnettes, where he had been confined for the matter of the Solidarité Républicaine. Buvignier was one of the noteworthy figures on the high benches of the Left; fair, close-shaven, with a stern glance, he made one think of the English Roundheads, and he had the bearing rather of a Cromwellian Puritan than of a Dantonist Man of the Mountain. Cournet told his adventure, the extremity had been terrible.
Buvignier shook his head.
"You have killed a man," he said.
In "Marie Tudor," I have made Fabiani answer under similar circumstances,—
"No, a Jew."