CHAPTER XVIII.
In the Luxembourg prison.
Juliette was alone at last--that is to say, comparatively alone, for there were too many aristocrats, too many criminels and traitors, in the prisons of Paris now, to allow of any seclusion of those who were about to be tried, condemned, and guillotined.
The young girl had been marched through the crowded streets of Paris, followed by a jeering mob, who readily recognised in the gentle, high-bred girl the obvious prey, which the Committee of Public Safety was wont, from time to time to throw to the hungry hydra-headed dog of the Revolution.
Lately the squalid spectators of the noisome spectacle on the Place de la Guillotine had had few of these very welcome sights: an aristocrat -- a real, elegant, refined woman, with white hands and proud, pale face--mounting the steps of the same scaffold on which perished the vilest criminals and most degraded brutes.
Madame Guillotine was, above all, catholic in her tastes, her gaunt arms, painted blood red, were open alike to the murderer and the thief, the aristocrats of ancient lineage, and the proletariat from the gutter.
But lately the executions had been almost exclusively of a political character.

The Girondins were fighting their last upon the bloody arena of the Revolution.

One by one they fell still fighting, still preaching moderation, still foretelling disaster and appealing to that people, whom they had roused from one slavery, in order to throw it headlong under a tyrannical yoke more brutish, more absolute than before.
There were twelve prisons in Paris then, and forty thousand in France, and they were all full.

An entire army went round the country recruiting prisoners.

There was no room for separate cells, no room for privacy, no cause or desire for the most elementary sense of delicacy.
Women, men, children--all were herded together, for one day, perhaps two, and a night or so, and then death would obliterate the petty annoyances, the womanly blushes caused by this sordid propinquity.
Death levelled all, erased everything.
When Marie Antoinette mounted the guillotine she had forgotten that for six weeks she practically lived day and night in the immediate companionship of a set of degraded soldiery.
Juliette, as she marched through the streets between two men of the National Guard, and followed by Merlin, was hooted and jeered at, insulted, pelted with mud.