The guillotine was impartial, and fell with equal velocity on the neck of the proud duke and the gutter-born _fille de joie,_ on a descendant of the Bourbons and the wastrel born in a brothel.
The ministerial decrees favoured the proletariat.

A crime against the Republic was indefensible, but one against the individual was dealt with, with all the paraphernalia of an elaborate administration of justice.

There were citizen judges and citizen advocates, and the rabble, who crowded in to listen to the trials, acted as honorary jury.
It was all thoroughly well done.

The citizen criminals were given every chance.
The afternoon of this hot August day, one of the last of glorious Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep into the long, bare room where this travesty of justice was being administered.
The Citizen-President sat at the extreme end of the room, on a rough wooden bench, with a desk in front of him littered with papers.
Just above him, on the bare, whitewashed wall, the words: "_La Republique: une et indivisible,_" and below them the device: "_Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!_" To the right and left of the Citizen-President, four clerks were busy making entries in that ponderous ledger, that amazing record of the foulest crimes the world has ever known, the "_Bulletin du Tribunal Revolutionnaire._" At present no one is speaking, and the grating of the clerks' quill pens against the paper is the only sound which disturbs the silence of the hall.
In front of the President, on a bench lower than his, sits Citizen Foucquier-Tinville, rested and refreshed, ready to take up his occupation, for as many hours as his country demands it of him.
On every desk a tallow candle, smoking and spluttering, throws a weird light, and more weird shadows, on the faces of clerks and President, on blank walls and ominous devices.
In the centre of the room a platform surrounded by an iron railing is ready for the accused.

Just in front of it, from the tall, raftered ceiling above, there hangs a small brass lamp, with a green _abat-jour._ Each side of the long, whitewashed walls there are three rows of benches, beautiful old carved oak pews, snatched from Notre Dame and from the Churches of St Eustache and St Germain l'Auxerrois.