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“Oh, monsieur, be careful, be careful!” cried Agesilaus.

Maurice didn’t even answer. He dashed out of the room, flew down the stairs and over to Lorin’s. It would be hard to describe the stupefaction, the anger, the rage of the worthy poet when he learned the news—we would have to revert to the relentlessly moving elegies Orestes inspired in his friend Pylades.

“So you don’t know where she is?” he kept saying, over and over.

“Lost, disappeared!” howled Maurice in a paroxysm of despair. “He’s killed her, Lorin, he’s killed her!”

“Oh, no, my friend, no, my dear Maurice. He hasn’t killed her. No, you don’t assassinate a woman like Geneviève after so many days of reflection. No, if he was going to kill her he’d have killed her on the spot and left her body at your place as a sign of revenge. No, don’t you see? He’s run away with her, all too happy to have got hold of his treasure again.”

“You don’t know him, Lorin; you don’t know him,” said Maurice. “That man had something ugly in his eyes.”

“No, no, no, you’ve got it wrong; he always gave me the impression of being a good sort of burgher—that’s what I thought, anyhow. He’s taken her to sacrifice her. He’ll get himself arrested with her and they’ll be killed together. Ah! Now that’s the danger,” said Lorin.

His words threw fat on the fire of Maurice’s delirium.

“I’ll find her! I’ll find her or die!” he cried.

“Well, as for that, we’ll find her, that’s for sure,” said Lorin. “Just calm down. Now look, Maurice, my good Maurice, believe me, you’ll waste your time looking if you don’t go about it the right way and you can’t go about it the right way while you’re so worked up.”

“Adieu, Lorin, adieu!”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going.”

“You’re leaving me? Why?”

“Because this is my concern alone; because I’m the only one who should risk his life to save Geneviève’s.”

“Are you tired of living?”

“I’ll take what comes: I’ll go and find the president of the local Surveillance Committee, I’ll talk to Hébert, to Danton, to Robespierre. I’ll confess all if they’ll just give her back to me.”

“All right,” said Lorin.

Without another word he rose, adjusted his sword belt, clapped the regulatory hat on his head, and, as Maurice had done before him, took two loaded pistols and shoved them in his pockets.

“Let’s go,” he said simply.

“But you’re compromising yourself!” cried Maurice.

“So what?

When, my friend, the play is done,

We should go back to having fun.”

“Where will we look first?” asked Maurice.

“Let’s look in the old quartier first—you know, the old rue Saint-Jacques. We’ll watch out for Maison-Rouge; wherever he is, Dixmer won’t be far behind. Then we’ll go over to the houses at the Vieille-Corderie. You know they’re talking about transfering Antoinette back to the Temple! Believe me, men like that won’t give up hope of saving her till the very last.”

“Yes,” Maurice agreed, “actually, you’re right.… Maison-Rouge, do you really think he’s still in Paris, then?”

“Dixmer certainly is.”

“True, true; they must have teamed up again,” said Maurice, whose wits were returning with the odd vague flicker.

From that moment, the two pals began to search. Endlessly. In vain. Paris is big and it casts a dense shadow. No fathomless pit is as dark and deep as Paris when it conceals a crime or misdemeanor entrusted to it.

Lorin and Maurice went past the place de Grève a hundred times; a hundred times they unwittingly skirted the cramped house in which Geneviève had most recently lived under Dixmer’s constant surveillance, the way priests of yore used to watch girls destined to become sacrificial virgins.

On her side, seeing herself doomed to die, Geneviève, like all generous souls, accepted the sacrifice and wished to die without any commotion. Besides, she feared any publicity that Maurice’s revenge would not fail to attract, less for Dixmer than for the Queen’s cause. And so she maintained a silence as profound as if death had already sealed her mouth shut.

Yet without saying anything to Lorin,