almost excused
him for having been what he had been: a noble, the friend of a prince
of the blood, and a place holder.

The Republic had reached the epoch of patriotic suppers, those repasts
of a whole street in the street; Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, in her
confused, terrified reminiscences of those days, could still see the
tables on Rue Pavee, with their legs in the streams of the blood of
September flowing from La Force! It was at one of these suppers that
Monsieur de Varandeuil conceived a scheme that completely assured his
immunity. He informed two of his neighbors at table, devoted patriots
both, one of whom was on intimate terms with Chaumette, that he was in
great embarrassment because his daughter had been privately baptized
only, so that she had no civil status, and said that he would be very
happy if Chaumette would have her entered on the registers of the
municipality and honor her with a name selected by him from the
Republican calendar of Greece or Rome. Chaumette at once arranged a
meeting with this father, _who had reached so high a level_, as they
said in those days. During the interview Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was
taken into a closet where she found two women who were instructed to
satisfy themselves as to her sex, and she showed them her breast. They
then escorted her to the great Salle des Declarations, and there, after
a metaphorical allocution, Chaumette baptized her _Sempronie_; a name
which habit was destined to fasten upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil and
which she never abandoned.

Somewhat protected and reassured by that episode, the family passed
through the terrible days preceding the fall of Robespierre. At last
came the ninth Thermidor and deliverance. But poverty was none the less
a pressing fact in the Varandeuil household. They had not lived through
the bitter days of the Revolution, they were not to live through the
wretched days of the Directory without unhoped-for succor, money sent by
Providence by the hand of Folly. The father and the two children could
hardly have existed without the income from four shares in the
_Vaudeville_, an investment which Monsieur de Varandeuil was happily
inspired to make in 1791, and which proved to be the best of all
possible investments in those years of death, when people felt the need
of forgetting death every evening--in those days of supreme agony, when
everyone wished to laugh his last laugh at the latest song. Soon these
shares, added to th