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Her breath caught in the darkness.

"Yes," she said. "There is a peruke that must wait."

Suddenly she backed from me, and put the hair from her eyes.

"If you dare, monsieur, it necessitates that we make our adieux."

"Au revoir, citoyenne. It must be that, in

deed."

She held out her hand, that was like a rose petal. I put my lips to it and lingered.

"Monsieur, monsieur !" she entreated.

The next moment I was in the street.

Who was my little citoyenne? little citoyenne? Ah! I shall never know. The terror gripped us, and these things passed. Incidents that would make the passion of sober times, the spirit of revolution dismisses with a shrug. To die in those days was such a vulgar complaint.

But I saw her once more, and then when my heart nestled to her image and my veins throbbed to her remembered touch.

I was strolling, on the morning following my strange experience, in the neighbourhood of the Champs Elysées, when I was aware of a great press of people all making in the direction of that open ground.

"What arrives, then, citizen?" I cried to one who paused for breath near me.

He gasped, the little morose.

To ask any ques

tion that showed one ignorant of the latest caprice of the Executive was almost to be "suspect.'

"Has not the citizen heard? The Committee of Safety has decreed the destruction of the dogs." "The dogs?"

"Sacred Blood!" he cried. "Is it not time, when they take, as it is said they did last night, a good friend of the Republic to supper?"

He ran on, and I followed. All about the Champs Elysées was a tumultuous crowd, and posted within were two battalions of the National Guard, their blue uniforms resplendent, their flint-locks shining in their hands. They, the soldiers, surrounded the area, save towards the Rue Royale, where a gap occurred; and on this gap all eyes were fixed.

Scarcely was I come on the scene when on every side a laughing hubbub arose. The dogs were being driven in, at first by twos and threes, but presently in great numbers at a time. For hours, I was told, had half the gamins of Paris been beating the coverts and hallooing their quarry to the toils.

At length, when many hundreds were accumulated in the free space, the soldiers closed in and drove the skulking brutes through the gap towards the Place Royale. And there they made a battue of it, shooting them down by the score.

With difficulty I made my way round to the Place, the better to view the sport. The poor trapped fripons ran hither and thither, crying, yelping-some fawning on their executioners, some

begging to the bullets, as if these were crusts thrown to them. And my heart woke to pity; for was I not witnessing the destruction of my good friends?

The noise the volleying, the howling, the shrieking of the canaille-was indescribable.

Suddenly my pulses gave a leap. I knew herRadegonde. She was driven into the fire and stood at bay, bristling.

"Nanette!" cried a quick acid voice; "Nanette -imbecile-my God!"

It all passed in an instant. There, starting from the crowd, was the figure of a tall sour-featured woman, the tiny tricolour bow in her scarlet cap; there was the thin excited musketeer, his piece to his shoulder; there was my citoyenne flung upon the ground, her arms about the neck of the hound.

Whether his aim was true or false, who can tell? He shot her through her dog, and his sergeant brained him. And in due course his sergeant was invited for his reward to look through the little window.

These were a straw or two in the torrent of the revolution.

It was Citizen Gaspardin who accepted the contract to remove the carcasses (some three thousand of them) that encumbered the Place Royale as a result of this drastic measure. However, his eye being bigger than his stomach, as the saying is, he

found himself short of means adequate to his task and so applied for the royal equipages to help him out of his difficulty. And these the Assembly, entering into the joke, was moved to lend him; and the dead dogs, hearsed in gilt and gingerbread as full as they could pack, made a rare procession of it through Paris, thereby pointing half-a-dozen morals that it is not worth while at this date to insist on.

I saw the show pass amidst laughter and clapping of hands; and I saw Radegonde, as I thought, her head lolling from the roof of the stateliest coach of all. But her place should have been on the seat of honour.

And the citoyenne, the dark window, the ripping sound in the street, and that bosom bursting to mine in agony? Episodes, my friend-mere travelling sparks in dead ashes, that glowed an instant and vanished. The times bristled with such. Love and hate, and all the kaleidoscope of passion-pouf! a sigh shook the tube, and form and colour were changed.

But-but-but-ah! I was glad thenceforth not to shudder for my heart when a blonde perruque went

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CHAPTER X.

THE AFFAIR OF THE CANDLES.

GARDEL-one of the most eminent and amusing rascals of my experience—is inextricably associated with my memories of the prison of the Little Force. He had been runner to the Marquis de Kercy; and that his vanity would by no means deny, though it should procure his conviction ten times over. He was vivacious, and at all expedients as ingenious as he was practical; and, while he was with us, the common - room of La Force was a theatre of varieties.

By a curious irony of circumstance, it fell to Madame, his former châtelaine, to second his extravagances. For he was her fellow-prisoner; and, out of all that motley, kaleidoscopic assemblage, an only representative of the traditions of her past. She indulged him, indeed, as if she would say, "In him, mes amis, you see exemplified the gaieties that I was born to patronise and applaud."

She was a small, faded woman, of thirty-five or so-one of those colourless aristocrats who, lying under no particular ban, were reserved to complete

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