CHAPTER I.
Paris: 1793 The outrage.
It would have been very difficult to say why Citizen Deroulede was quite so popular as he was.

Still more difficult would it have been to state the reason why he remained immune from the prosecutions, which were being conducted at the rate of several scores a day, now against the moderate Gironde, anon against the fanatic Mountain, until the whole of France was transformed into one gigantic prison, that daily fed the guillotine.
But Deroulede remained unscathed.

Even Merlin's law of the suspect had so far failed to touch him.

And when, last July, the murder of Marat brought an entire holocaust of victims to the guillotine--from Adam Lux, who would have put up a statue in honour of Charlotte Corday, with the inscription: "Greater than Brutus", to Charlier, who would have had her publicly tortured and burned at the stake for her crime--Deroulede alone said nothing, and was allowed to remain silent.
The most seething time of that seething revolution.

No one knew in the morning if his head would still be on his own shoulders in the evening, or if it would be held up by Citizen Samson the headsman, for the sansculottes of Paris to see.
Yet Deroulede was allowed to go his own way.