The wretched Queen Marie Antoinette still lingered in the Temple with her son and daughter.
Madame Elisabeth was still allowed to say her prayers in peace, but _ci-devant_ dukes and counts were getting scarce: those who had not perished at the hand of Citizen Samson were plying some trade in Germany or England.
There were aristocratic joiners, innkeepers, and hairdressers.

The proudest names in France were hidden beneath trade signs in London and Hamburg.

A good number owed their lives to that mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, that unknown Englishman who had snatched scores of victims from the clutches of Tinville the Prosecutor, and sent M.Chauvelin, baffled, back to France.
Aristocrats were getting scarce, so it was now the turn of deputies of the National Convention, of men of letters, men of science or of art, men who had sent others to the guillotine a twelvemonth ago, and men who had been loudest in defence of anarchy and its Reign of Terror.
They had revolutionised the Calendar: the Citizen-Deputies, and every good citizen of France, called this 19th day of August 1793 the 2nd Fructidor of the year I.of the New Era.
At six o'clock on that afternoon a young girl suddenly turned the angle of the Rue Ecole de Medecine, and after looking quickly to the right and left she began deliberately walking along the narrow street.
It was crowded just then.

Groups of excited women stood jabbering before every doorway.

It was the home-coming hour after the usual spectacle on the Place de la Revolution.