Like the rats in the cellars below, they had done away with one another, swallowed one another up, torn each other to pieces in this wild rage for a Utopian fraternity.
Marat, founder of the organisation, had been murdered by a girl's hand; but Charon, Manuel, Osselin had gone the usual way, denounced by their colleagues, Rabaut, Custine, Bison, who in their turn were sent to the guillotine by those more powerful, perhaps more eloquent, than themselves.
It was merely a case of who could shout the loudest at an assembly of the National Convention.
_"La guillotine va toujours!"_ After the death of Marat, Merlin became the most prominent member of the club--he and Foucquier-Tinville, his bosom friend, Public Prosecutor, and the most bloodthirsty homicide of this homicidal age.
Bosom friend both, yet they worked against one another, undermining each other's popularity, whispering persistently, one against the other: "He is a traitor!" It had become just a neck-to-neck race between them towards the inevitable goal--the guillotine.
Foucquier-Tinville is in the ascendant for the moment.

Merlin had been given a task which he had failed to accomplish.

For days now, weeks even, the debates of this noble assembly had been chiefly concerned with the downfall of Citizen-Deputy Deroulede.

His popularity, his calm security in the midst of this reign of terror and anarchy, had been a terrible thorn in the flesh of these rabid Jacobins.
And now the climax had been reached.

An anonymous denunciation had roused the hopes of these sanguinary patriots.