espierre, were destined to be the outstanding figures of the French
Revolution. It is worth while to stop here for a little and consider
these two men in their historical aspects and for the profound
influence which they exerted on the lives of our characters.

As the storm clouds blacken the sky and the sullen sea (not yet lashed
to fury) is ridged in deep, advancing breakers, the mariner's eye
discerns these stormy petrels flying about or momentarily perched on
the masts of the Ship of State.

Mark them well--Danton and Robespierre: today, merely "esurient
advocates," petty men of law come up from the provinces to win their
fortunes in Paris; tomorrow, leaders of faction; some months or years
later, the rulers of France!

[Illustration: PIERRE BECOMES THE DEVOTED WORSHIPPER OF LOUISE WHOM HE
HAS SAVED FROM THE RIVER]

Danton--"the huge, brawny figure, through whose black brows and rude
flattened face there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet
furibund."

Robespierre--aptly described as the meanest man of the Tiers Estat:
"that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in
spectacles; his eyes, troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing
dimly the uncertain future-time; complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar
color, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green!"

Such were they, afterwards to be known respectively as "the
pock-marked Thunderer" and the "sea-green Incorruptible" of the
Revolution. The slight, fox-like man had got himself elected to the
States-General which in May, 1789, convened at Versailles to take up
the troubled state of the country, whilst the lion-like and fiery
Danton was the president of the Cordeliers electoral district of
Paris--the head of a popular faubourg faction, not yet of power in the
State.

The new helmsmen of the State, headed by Mirabeau, steered with
considerable success among waters as yet but partly roiled. At
Versailles an outward and visible Liberalism triumphed. The Third
Estate or Commons, consolidating its authority as a permanent
assembly, took measures to end the national bankruptcy and tried to
cope with the awful menace of starvation. It was a bourgeois body,
thinly sprinkled with members of the nobility and clergy; its aim, to
abolish the worst seigniorial abuses, restore prosperity, and support
the throne by a system of constitutional guarantees.

But when the Storm broke, it was not at Versailles where these
lawgiving Six Hundred