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He held out his hand to Simon and turned on his heel with a haste that didn’t augur well for the cobbler.

“What more bloody details do you want me to come up with? They’ve given people the chop for less.”

“Patience! Patience!” Fouquier sang out serenely. “We can’t do everything at once.”

On that note, Fouquier went back through the wickets with a determined stride. Simon looked around for his citizen Théodore for a bit of commiseration. He couldn’t see him anywhere in the room. Yet scarcely had Simon disappeared through the west gate than Théodore reappeared at the corner of a scribe’s booth, the inhabitant of the booth by his side.

“What time do they shut the gates?” Théodore asked the man.

“Five o’clock.”

“And then what happens here?”

“Nothing; the room’s empty till the next day.”

“No rounds, no visits?”

“No, monsieur, our booths are locked.”

The term monsieur made Théodore frown, and he looked round with concern.

“The pliers and the pistols are in the booth?” he asked.

“Yes, under the rug.”

“Go back to our place.… Speaking of which, show me again the courtroom that doesn’t have bars on the window and that looks over a courtyard near the place Dauphine.”

“It’s on the left between the pillars, under the lantern.”

“Good. Off you go and keep the horses at the appointed place!”

“Oh! Good luck, monsieur, good luck! … You can count on me!”

“This is the moment.… No one’s looking.… Open your booth.”

“Done, monsieur; I’ll pray for you!”

“It’s not for me that we need to pray! Adieu.”

With a last eloquent look, citizen Théodore slipped so adroitly under the little roof of the booth that he simply dematerialized, like the shadow of the scribe shutting the door.

The worthy scribe pulled the key out of the lock, stuck some papers under his arm, and left the vast hall with its few remaining employees, flushed out of their offices by the clock striking five like a rear guard of late-returning bees.

36

CITIZEN THÉODORE

Night had enveloped in its greyish cloak this immense hall, whose unhappy echoes were doomed to repeat the sharp words of lawyers and litigants’ supplications.

Here and there in the gloom, white columns stood straight and un-moving like sentinels keeping watch over the place, or like phantoms protecting some sacred site.

The only sound that could be heard in the darkness was the gnawing and four-legged galloping of rats, chewing away at all the pap locked away in the scribes’ booths, after having first chewed their way through the wood.

At times the sound of a carriage could also be heard, penetrating as far as the sanctuary of Themis, the Goddess of Law, as an academic would say, along with the dim clinking of keys that seemed to come from below ground. All of this was just distant rustling, but nothing brings out the opacity of silence as much as remote noise, just as nothing brings out the darkness as much as the appearance of a light in the distance.

Certainly anyone who had risked being in the vast Palais hall at this hour would have been seized with a dizzying terror; the outside walls were still red with the blood of the victims of September, when the staircases had seen twenty-five dead men walking; and a thickness of only several feet separated the flagstones from the dungeons of the Conciergerie, peopled by the bleached bones of skeletons.

Yet in the middle of this fearful night, in the middle of this almost solemn silence, a faint grinding noise could be detected: the door of one of the scribes’ booths was opening with a screech of hinges and a shadow, blacker than the shadow of night, slipped carefully out of the bunker.

Then the patriot enragé, who was called monsieur sotto voce and who claimed out loud to be one Théodore, trod lightly over the uneven flagstones.

He held a heavy pair of iron pliers in his right hand, and steadied with his left a pistol with two bullets that hung at his belt. Counting his steps as he went, he felt around with the tip of his toe for the crack that time wears between each stone join.