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That moment the sound of the drums drew near and Maurice heard shouting in the street:

“Major plot uncovered in the Temple by citizen Simon! Major plot in support of the Widow Capet uncovered in the Temple!”

“Yes, yes,” said Maurice, “it’s just as I thought. There is some truth in all that. And Lorin’s in the middle of these jubilant hordes.… He could very well hold out his hand to that girl and get himself hacked to pieces.…”

Maurice grabbed his hat, buckled on his sword, and was in the street in two bounds.

“Where is he?” Maurice wondered. “No doubt on the road to the Conciergerie.”

And so he bolted off toward the quai de l’Horloge.

At the far end of the quai de la Mégisserie, pikes and bayonets caught his eye, spiking the air over a mob of people’s heads. He thought he could make out the uniform of a National Guard in the middle of what was clearly a hostile crowd jostling around him. He ran, his heart lurching, toward the mob blocking the waterfront.

The National Guard pressed by the troop from Marseilles was Lorin … and he was pale, his mouth tight, eyes glowering menacingly, hand on the hilt of his sword, busy calculating where to place the blows he was preparing to strike. Two paces from Lorin was Simon, cackling away with a spine-chilling sound and pointing out Lorin to the Marseillais and the rabble at large.

“Hey! Hey! You see that guy there? He’s one of the aristocrats I flushed out of the Temple yesterday! He’s one of the ones who like to put mail in carnations. He’s the accomplice of the Tison girl, who’ll be coming by shortly. So, you see him? He’s taking a quiet stroll along the Seine while his accomplice is about to walk to the guillotine. And maybe she was more than his accomplice, eh? Maybe she was his mistress and he came here to bid her farewell—or try and help her escape!”

Lorin was not a man to put up with this sort of talk for long. He drew his sword from its scabbard. At the same time, the crowd parted before a man barreling his way into them headfirst, knocking three or four onlookers aside with his broad shoulders, just as they were gearing up to have a go at Lorin.

“You’ll be happy now, Simon,” said Maurice. “I bet you were sorry I wasn’t here before with my friend so you could do a proper job as the Great Denouncer. Denounce away, Simon, denounce! I’m here now.”

“My word, yes,” said Simon with his hideous sneer, “and you’re here just in time. This one,” he said to the mob, “is the handsome Maurice Lindey. He was accused at the same time as the Tison girl, but he managed to wriggle out of it because he’s rich.”

“String ‘em up, string ‘em up!” cried the imports from Marseilles.

“Go on, just you try it!” said Maurice.

With that he took a step forward and pricked one of the most savage of the cutthroats right in the middle of the forehead as though testing his aim; the man was immediately blinded by blood.

“Murder!” he screamed.

The Marseillais put down their pikes and took up their machetes or loaded their pistols. The crowd scattered in fear, leaving the two friends isolated and exposed, like a double target to be attacked by all comers.

They gave each other one last sublime smile, for they fully expected to be devoured by this storm of iron and flame threatening to break over them, when suddenly the door of the house they had backed into swung open and a swarm of young muscadins in fancy regalia, every one of them armed with a saber and every one of them sporting a pair of pistols at his belt, fell upon the Marseillais and began to wade into them.

“Hooray!” cried Lorin and Maurice as one, recharged by this shot in the arm, without reflecting for a moment that by fighting in the ranks of the muscadins they were proving Simon’s accusations true.

“Hooray!”

But if they weren’t thinking of their salvation, someone else was doing it for them. A short young man of twenty-five or twenty-six, with blue eyes and the hands of a woman, began wielding a sapper’s saber with great vigor, although he looked