The place when he entered was occupied mostly by labourers and workmen, dressed very much as he was himself, and quite as grimy as he had become after having driven about for hours in a laundry-cart and in a coal-cart, and having walked twelve kilometres, some of which he had covered whilst carrying a sleeping child in his arms.
Thus, Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart., the friend and companion of the Prince of Wales, the most fastidious fop the salons of London and Bath had ever seen, was in no way distinguishable outwardly from the tattered, half-starved, dirty, and out-at-elbows products of this fraternising and equalising Republic.
He was so hungry that the ill-cooked, badly-served meal tempted him to eat; and he ate on in silence, seemingly more interested in boiled beef than in the conversation that went on around him.

But he would not have been the keen and daring adventurer that he was if he did not all the while keep his ears open for any fragment of news that the desultory talk of his fellow-diners was likely to yield to him.
Politics were, of course, discussed; the tyranny of the sections, the slavery that this free Republic had brought on its citizens.

The names of the chief personages of the day were all mentioned in turns Focquier-Tinville, Santerre, Danton, Robespierre.

Heron and his sleuth-hounds were spoken of with execrations quickly suppressed, but of little Capet not one word.
Blakeney could not help but infer that Chauvelin, Heron and the commissaries in charge were keeping the escape of the child a secret for as long as they could.
He could hear nothing of Armand's fate, of course.

The arrest--if arrest there had been--was not like to be bruited abroad just now.