was prepared to oblige her benefactor in all ways he might wish,
but she thought it more becoming that he asked for no favour and she
offered none; it seemed to her a pretty way to part so, and what good
manners required.

Brotteaux slipped a few assignats into her hand to pay her coach-hire to
Palaiseau. It was the half of his fortune, and, albeit he was notorious
for his lavishness towards women, it was the first time he had ever made
so equal a partition of his goods with any of the sex.

She asked him his name.

"I am called Maurice."

It was with reluctance he opened the garret door for her:

"Good-bye, Athenais."

She kissed him. "Monsieur Maurice," she said, "when you think of me, if
ever you do, call me Marthe; that is the name I was christened, the name
they called me by in the village.... Good-bye and thank you.... Your
very humble servant, Monsieur Maurice."

XV

The prisons were full to bursting and must be emptied; the work of
judging, judging, must go on without truce or respite. Seated against
the tapestried walls with their fasces and red caps of liberty, like
their fellows of the fleurs-de-lis, the judges preserved the same
gravity, the same dreadful calm, as their Royal predecessors. The Public
Prosecutor and his Deputies, worn out with fatigue, consumed with the
fever of sleeplessness and brandy, could only shake off their exhaustion
by a violent effort; their broken health made them tragic figures to
look upon. The jurors, divers in character and origin, some educated,
others ignorant, craven or generous, gentle or violent, hypocritical or
sincere, but all men who, knowing the fatherland and the Republic in
danger, suffered or feigned to suffer the same anguish, to burn with the
same ardour; all alike primed to atrocities of virtue or of fear, they
formed but one living entity, one single head, dull and irritable, one
single soul, a beast of the apocalypse that by the mere exercise of its
natural functions produced a teeming brood of death. Kind-hearted or
cruel by caprice of sensibility, when shaken momentarily by a sudden
pang of pity, they would acquit with streaming eyes a prisoner whom an
hour before they would have condemned to the guillotine with taunts. The
further they proceeded with their task, the more impetuously did they
follow the impulses of their heart.

Judge and jury toiled, fevered and half asleep with overwork, distracted
by the excitement outside and the order