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He pointed to Lorin with his fist.

“I’ll stop you all right,” said Lorin, unsheathing his sword. “And if you call me a royalist, an aristocrat, or a traitor one more time, I’ll run my sword right through your rickety body.”

“He’s threatening me!” cried Simon. “Guards! Guards!”

“I am the guard,” said Lorin. “So I wouldn’t call me if I were you, because if I come any closer to you, I’ll exterminate you!”

“Over here, citizen municipal officer, over here!” cried Simon, feeling seriously threatened this time by Lorin.

“The sergeant is right,” came the cold reply of the municipal officer Simon had called to his aid. “You dishonor the nation. Let go! Imagine beating a child!”

“And do you know why he’s beating him, Maurice? Because the child doesn’t want to sing ‘Madame Veto,’ because the son doesn’t want to insult his mother.”

“You miserable abortion!” said Maurice.

“You too?” said Simon. “So I’m surrounded by traitors?”

“You mongrel!” said the municipal officer, seizing Simon by the throat and tearing his strap out of his hands. “Just you try and prove that Maurice Lindey is a traitor.”

With that, Maurice brought the strap down hard on the cobbler’s shoulders.

“Thank you, monsieur,” said the child, who was stoically watching the scene. “But he’ll only take it out on me.”

“Come, Capet,” said Lorin, “come, child; if he hits you again, call for help and we’ll come and chastise him, the butcher. Come, young Capet, let’s go back to the tower.”

“Why do you call me Capet, you who protect me?” said the child. “You know very well that Capet is not my name.”

“Really? How so? It isn’t your name?” said Lorin. “What is your name?”

“I am called Louis-Charles de Bourbon. Capet is the name of one of my ancestors. I know the history of France, my father taught me.”

“And you want to teach cobbling to a child to whom a king has taught the history of France?” cried Lorin. “For crying out loud!”

“Don’t you worry,” said Maurice to the child. “I’ll report him.”

“And I’ll report you,” said Simon. “Among other things, I’ll say that instead of one woman who had the right to enter the courtyard, you let in two.”

At that moment, in fact, the two women were coming out of the dungeon. Maurice ran over to them.

“So, citizeness,” he said, addressing the woman nearest to him. “Did you see your mother?”

Héloïse Tison immediately slipped between the municipal officer and her companion.

“Yes, thank you, citizen,” she said.

Maurice would have liked to see the young woman’s friend or at least hear her voice, but she was swaddled in her mantle and seemed determined not to utter a sound. It seemed to him that she was even trembling.

Smelling a rat, he swiftly ran up the stairs and, reaching the first room, saw through the glass the Queen hide in her pocket something he assumed to be a note.

“Oh, no!” he said to himself. “Have I been had?”

He called his colleague.

“Citizen Agricola,” he said, “go to Marie Antoinette and don’t let her out of your sight.”

“Right!” said the municipal officer. “Is the …”

“In you go, I say, and don’t lose a minute, an instant, a second.”

The officer entered the Queen’s chamber.

“Call Mother Tison,” he said to a National Guard.

Five minutes later, Mother Tison arrived, beaming.

“I saw my daughter,” she said.

“Where?” Maurice asked.

“Here, in this very room.”

“Very well. And your daughter didn’t ask to see the Austrian woman?”

“No.”

“She didn’t go into her room?”

“No.”

“While you were talking to your daughter, no one came out of the prisoners’ room?”

“How do I know? I was looking at my daughter—I hadn’t seen her for three months after all.”

“Think carefully.”

“Ah, yes! I remember now, I think.”

“What?”

“The girl came out.”

“Marie Thérèse, the Queen’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Did she speak to your daughter?”

“No.”

“Your daughter didn’t hand her anything?”

“No.”

“She didn’t pick anything up off the floor?”

“My daughter?”

“No, Marie Antoinette’s!”

“Yes, she did, she picked up her hanky.”

“Ah! You sorry