I
"You are a stranger in Paris, I think, Citoyen," she said to Hector, when the porter had mounted the winding stairs. "You will do well to don a cockade before you go out in the street again".
"Give me your hat," she said.
She produced a large tricolour cockade, and with a pin which she took from her ample bosom, fastened it across the buckle that adorned the front of the young man's hat. "Et voila!" she exclaimed.
And so, in the wake of the porter, who wore in his button-hole a little plaque inscribed, beneath crossed fasces, 'La Patrie ou la Mort,' Hector Fotheringay, Lieutenant and Captain of His Majesty's Third Foot Guards, went forth adorned with the emblem of regicide France.
Gonna break my own rules.
There will be no strangers in Paris, at least for a year.
Unless she breaks her own rules.
II
It was then that all the insticts of Hector's upbringing asserted themselves. A wild and unreasoning anger seized upon him, a fierce revulsion against the Jacobins and all their works. Better a thousand times to die even as the man at his feet had died than to be carted like an ox to the slaughter. But he didn't mean to die just yet or, if he must, he would, at least, die fighting. He sprang to his feet and darted out into the passage.
Being a person who adheres strictly to the modern rules of Political Correctness I will ,on this occasion, refrain from responding.
(breaking the rule)
I love that penguin gif. Been around. Cant help grinning like a madman every time I see it.
III
For a brief moment Hector wrestled with a feeling of panic. This stunted creature with his frenzied talk of blood horrified him so that the mere touch of his arm on his sleeve made his senses reel. Resolutely he fought down his paralysing sense of fear. Fate had willed that he should retain the identity of Jean-Francois Charpentier and see this mad adventure through. He must collect his thoughts, he told himself, for he would have to call on all his sang-froid, all his condidence, to meet the ordeal that stood before.
Two trees in green tubs flanked the door of a small cafe. The door opened from the square directly into a long room with a low ceiling which, like the walls, was discoloured. The floor was strewn with sawdust and on the stained and peeling walls various inscriptions, mainly of a political character, were scrawled.
About a table in a back room five or six men were assembled drinking spirits out of tin pannikins. The air was suffocating with the mingled fumes of unwashed humanity and strong tobacco.
At the door Grand-Duc saluted the company.
"Bon soir, les amis!" he said. "I bring you the patriot Jean-Francois Charpentier who has slipped the yoke of tyrants to offer his services to the Republic!"
"Shut the door, nom d'une pipe!" grumbled a hoarse voice. "There are pannikins on the side, comrade! Draw yourself and the young man a dram!" Some one made room for them on one of the two wooden benches set on either side of the table.
They were a villainous-looking lot assembled at that board. Round that table were faces such as Hector had only seen before in the greasy crowds that flocked to the hangings at Tyburn, or in the mobs that had glared savagely at him and his company of Guards during the recent street riots in London, brutal faces, debauched and debased, with a vulpine leer in their cruel eyes, beetling foreheads and loose, sensuous lips...
"Baste!" cried the man with the bloated face. "The Citizen will become acquainted quick enough with the Committee of General Security!..."
La Comite de la Surete Generale! The infamy of this little band of seven had spread far beyond the boundaries of France. Men shuddered at the very name of this gang of butchers, 'les gens de l'expedition,' as they were called in Paris- 'the dispatchers', as one might say - who brought their daily grist to the red machine of the Place de la Revolution. Hector seized his pannikin and drank deeply of the spirit it contained, raw and fiery Hollands that burned his throat.
IV
He was haunted by the appaling danger of his position. It preyed upon his mind. As he elbowed his way through the greasy crowds that hung all day about the Convention and marked how the Revolution had brought to the surface the lees of the Parisian populace, always the most potentially violent mob of the world, he felt forlorn, abandoned, a straw drifting aimessly upon an angry ocean. It broke his sleep of nights, those hot and breathless nights that a torrid June had brought upon Paris.
This is an RSS feed designed to be read by a computer. Which you aren't.
I wasn't looking, when you pulled me in.
Whoa, yaaa, oh lord here I come again.
