Princess Elizabeth
whispered to him to control his feelings and be a man. Yet he was one
of those who lived to tell the tale of his appearance before the dread
tribunal of Maillard. When he was acquitted, the expectant cut-throats
were wild with enthusiasm. They cheered him; they gave him the
fraternal accolade; they uncovered as he passed along the line; and a
voice cried, "Take care where he walks! Don't you see he has got white
stockings on?"

One acquittal is remembered beyond all the rest. In every school and
in every nursery of France the story continues to be told how
Sombreuil, the governor of the Invalides, was acquitted by the judges,
but would have been butchered by the mob outside if his daughter had
not drunk to the nation in a glass filled with the warm blood of the
last victim. They were taken home in triumph. Sombreuil perished in
the Reign of Terror. His daughter married, and died at Avignon in
1823, at the height of the royalist reaction. The fame of that heroic
moment in her life filled the land, and her heart was brought to
Paris, to be laid in the consecrated ground where she had worshipped
as a child, and it rests under the same gilded canopy that covers the
remains of Napoleon. Many people believe that this is one of the
legends of royalism which should be strung with the mock pearls of
history. No contemporary mentions it, and it does not appear before
1801. Mlle. de Sombreuil obtained a pension from the Convention, but
this was not included in the statement of her claims. An Englishman,
who witnessed the release of Sombreuil, only relates that father and
daughter were carried away swooning from the strain of emotion. I
would not dwell on so well-worn an anecdote if I believed that it was
false. The difficulty of disbelief is that the son of the heroine
wrote a letter affirming it, in which he states that his mother was
never afterwards able to touch a glass of red wine. The point to bear
in mind is that these atrocious criminals rejoiced as much in a man to
save as in a man to kill. They were servants of a cause, acting under
authority.

Robespierre, among the chiefs, seems to have aimed mainly at the
destruction of the priests. Others proposed that the prisoners should
be confined underground, and that water should be let in until they
were drowned. Marat advised that the prisons should be burnt, with
their inmates. "The 2nd of September," said Collot d'Herbois, "is the
first article of the