cause the Red
Flag of the Republic had been mysteriously town down over night, burnt
the entire little village down to the last hovel and guillotined every
one of the three hundred and fifty inhabitants.

And Chauvelin knew all that. Nay, more! he was himself a member of that
so-called government which had countenanced these butcheries, by giving
unlimited powers to men like Collot, like Maignet and Carriere. He
was at one with them in their republican ideas and he believed in the
regeneration and the purification of France, through the medium of the
guillotine, but he propounded his theories and carried out his most
bloodthirsty schemes with physically clean hands and in an immaculately
cut coat.

Even now when Collot d'Herbois lounged before him, with mud-bespattered
legs stretched out before him, with dubious linen at neck and wrists,
and an odour of rank tobacco and stale, cheap wine pervading his whole
personality, the more fastidious man of the world, who had consorted
with the dandies of London and Brighton, winced at the enforced
proximity.

But it was the joint characteristic of all these men who had turned
France into a vast butchery and charnel-house, that they all feared
and hated one another, even more whole-heartedly than they hated the
aristocrats and so-called traitors whom they sent to the guillotine.
Citizen Lebon is said to have dipped his sword into the blood which
flowed from the guillotine, whilst exclaiming: "Comme je l'aime ce sang
coule de traitre!" but he and Collot and Danton and Robespierre, all of
them in fact would have regarded with more delight still the blood of
any one of their colleagues.

At this very moment Collot d'Herbois and Chauvelin would with utmost
satisfaction have denounced, one the other, to the tender mercies of the
Public Prosecutor. Collot made no secret of his hatred for Chauvelin,
and the latter disguised it but thinly under the veneer of contemptuous
indifference.

"As for that dammed Englishman," added Collot now, after a slight pause,
and with another savage oath, "if 'tis my good fortune to lay hands on
him, I'd shoot him then and there like a mad dog, and rid France once
and forever of this accursed spy."

"And think you, Citizen Collot," rejoined Chauvelin with a shrug of the
shoulders, "that France would be rid of all English adventurers by the
summary death of this one man?"

"He is the ringleader, at any rate..."

"And has at least nineteen disciple