t left long in uncertainty, for the
details of the catastrophe arrived all too soon."

CHAPTER VIII

For some days Avignon had its assassins, as Marseilles had had them, and
as Nimes was about to have them; for some days all Avignon shuddered at
the names of five men--Pointu, Farges, Roquefort, Naudaud, and Magnan.

Pointu was a perfect type of the men of the South, olive-skinned and
eagle-eyed, with a hook nose, and teeth of ivory. Although he was hardly
above middle height, and his back was bent from bearing heavy burdens,
his legs bowed by the pressure of the enormous masses which he daily
carried, he was yet possessed of extraordinary strength and dexterity.
He could throw over the Loulle gate a 48-pound cannon ball as easily as
a child could throw its ball. He could fling a stone from one bank of
the Rhone to the other where it was two hundred yards wide. And lastly,
he could throw a knife backwards while running at full speed with such
strength and precision of aim that this new kind of Parthian arrow would
go whistling through the air to hide two inches of its iron head in a
tree trunk no thicker than a man's thigh. When to these accomplishments
are added an equal skill with the musket, the pistol, and the
quarter-staff, a good deal of mother wit, a deep hatred for Republicans,
against whom he had vowed vengeance at the foot of the scaffold on
which his father and mother had perished, an idea can be formed of the
terrible chief of the assassins of Avignon, who had for his lieutenants,
Farges the silk-weaver, Roquefort the porter, Naudaud the baker, and
Magnan the secondhand clothes dealer.

Avignon was entirely in the power of these five men, whose brutal
conduct the civil and military authorities would not or could not
repress, when word came that Marshal Brune, who was at Luc in command
of six thousand troops, had been summoned to Paris to give an account of
his conduct to the new Government.

The marshal, knowing the state of intense excitement which prevailed
in the South, and foreseeing the perils likely to meet him on the road,
asked permission to travel by water, but met with an official refusal,
and the Duc de Riviere, governor of Marseilles, furnished him with a
safe-conduct. The cut-throats bellowed with joy when they learned that
a Republican of '89, who had risen to the rank of marshal under the
Usurper, was about to pass through Avignon. At the same time sinister
reports began to run from