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Maurice became doubly alert. A door opened and he could hear more clearly.

“Yes,” said a voice. “Yes, he’s a spy; he’s onto something and he has definitely been sent to ferret out our secrets. If we let him go, we run the risk of his denouncing us. But what about his word?”

“Naturally he’ll give us his word and then he’ll go back on it. Is he a gentleman that we should trust in his word?”

Maurice ground his teeth at the notion, still held by some, that you had to be a gentleman to keep your word.

“But does he know who we are to denounce us?”

“No, certainly not, he doesn’t know who we are, he doesn’t know what we’re up to. But he knows this address and he’ll come back with plenty of reinforcements.”

The argument seemed pretty peremptory.

“Well, then,” said the voice that had already struck Maurice several times as being the voice of the leader. “So it’s decided!”

“Well, yes; a hundred times yes. I don’t understand you and your magnanimity, my dear fellow; if the Committee of Public Safety got hold of us, you’d soon see whether they’d bother with all these niceties.”

“And so you persist in your decision, gentlemen?”

“Of course we do, and I hope you’re not going to oppose us.”

“I have only one vote, gentlemen, and it was in favor of giving him back his liberty. You have six votes, all six in favor of death. So death wins.”

The sweat pouring down Maurice’s forehead suddenly turned to ice.

“He’ll cry out, scream,” said the voice. “I hope you’ve at least taken Madame Dixmer out of hearing?”

“She knows nothing, she’s in the pavilion across the way.”

“Madame Dixmer,” murmured Maurice. “I’m beginning to see the light. I’m at that master tanner’s place, the one who spoke to me in the old rue Saint-Jacques, who sneered at me when I couldn’t tell him what my friend’s name was. But why on earth does a master tanner want to assassinate me? In any case, before they assassinate me, I’ll dispatch more than one of them.”

And with that, Maurice bounded toward the inoffensive implement that would soon become a terrible weapon in his hands. Then he stood behind the door so that he would be shielded by it when it opened. His heart was beating fit to burst, and in the silence his heartbeat thundered out. Suddenly a chill ran down his spine as a voice said:

“If you take my advice, you’ll just smash in a window and shoot him through the bars with a rifle.”

“No, no, no; no explosions,” said another voice. “An explosion could give us away. Ah! There you are, Dixmer. What about your wife?”

“I’ve just had a look through the shutters. She has no idea what’s happening, she’s reading.”

“Dixmer, you decide. Are you for a rifle or a dagger?”

“I say the dagger. Let’s go!”

“Let’s go,” the five or six other voices chorused.

Maurice was a child of the Revolution, with a heart of gold and a soul given to atheism, like so many young men at the time. But when he heard the words “Let’s go” from behind the door that alone stood between him and death, he remembered the sign of the cross that his mother had taught him when he was just a little boy made to say his prayers on his knees at bedtime.

Footsteps drew near, then stopped; the key ground in the lock and the door slowly opened. In the minute it took, Maurice had said to himself: “If I waste time lashing out, I’ll be killed. By rushing at my assassins, I’ll take them by surprise; I’ll reach the garden, the alleyway, I may just get away.”

Immediately he sprang like a lion, giving a wild yell in which he managed to pack more menace than fear. He felled the first two men, who thought he was tied up blindfolded and so were far from expecting an onslaught; he then drove through the rest and covered thirty feet in one second flat, thanks to his calves of steel. He could see a door to the garden standing wide open at the end of a hallway and he flew at it, vaulted ten steps, and landed in the garden; getting his bearings as best he could, he ran to the outside door.

But this door was well and truly locked. Maurice tugged at the twin locks,