There was no time for sleep, when so much had to be done for the safety of the threatened Republic.
As Juliette turned her steps towards the river, she met the crowd of workmen, whom France was employing for her defence.
Behind her, in the Luxembourg Gardens, and all along the opposite bank of the river, the furnaces were already ablaze, and the smiths at work forging the guns.
At every step now Juliette came across the great placards, pinned to the tall gallows-shaped posts, which proclaim to every passing citizen, that the people of France are up and in arms.
Right across the Place de l'Institut a procession of market carts, laden with vegetables and a little fruit, wends its way slowly towards the centre of the town.

They each carry tiny tricolour flags, with a Pike and Cap of Liberty surmounting the flagstaff.
They are good patriots the market-gardeners, who come in daily to feed the starving mob of Paris, with the few handfuls of watery potatoes, and miserable, vermin-eaten cabbages, which that fraternal Revolution still allows them to grow without hindrance.
Everyone seems busy with their work this early in the morning: the business of killing does not begin until later in the day.
For the moment Juliette can get along quite unmolested: the women and children mostly hurrying on towards the vast encampments in the Tuileries, where lint, and bandages, and coats for the soldiers are manufactured all the day.
The walls of all the houses bear the great patriotic device: "_Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, sinon La Mort_"; others are more political in their proclamation: "_La Republique une et indivisible_." But on the walls of the Louvre, of the great palace of whilom kings, where the Roi Soleil held his Court, and flirted with the prettiest women in France, there the new and great Republic has affixed its final mandate.
A great poster glued to the wall bears the words: "_La Loi concernan les Suspects_." Below the poster is a huge wooden box with a slit at the top.
This is the latest invention for securing the safety of this one and indivisible Republic.
Henceforth everyone becomes a traitor at one word of denunciation from an idler or an enemy, and, as in the most tyrannical days of the Spanish Inquisition one-half of the nation was set to spy upon the other, that wooden box, with its slit, is put there ready to receive denunciations from one hand against another.
Had Juliette paused but for the fraction of a second, had she stopped to read the placard setting forth this odious law, had she only reflected, then she would even now have turned back, and fled from that gruesome box of infamies, as she would from a dangerous and noisome reptile or from the pestilence.
But her long vigil, her prayers, her ecstatic visions of heroic martyrs had now completely numbed her faculties.

Her vitality, her sensibilities were gone: she had become an automaton gliding to her doom, without a thought or a tremor.
She drew the letter from her bosom, and with a steady hand dropped it into the box.

The irreclaimable had now occurred.

Nothing she could henceforth say or do, no prayers or agonised vigils, no miracles even, could undo her action or save Paul Deroulede from trial and guillotine.
One or two groups of people hurrying to their work had seen her drop the letter into the box.