.

THE DEMON CHANCE.
St.Just would have given much to be back in his lonely squalid lodgings now.

Too late did he realise how wise had been the dictum which had warned him against making or renewing friendships in France.
Men had changed with the times.

How terribly they had changed! Personal safety had become a fetish with most--a goal so difficult to attain that it had to be fought for and striven for, even at the expense of humanity and of self-respect.
Selfishness--the mere, cold-blooded insistence for self-advancement--ruled supreme.

De Batz, surfeited with foreign money, used it firstly to ensure his own immunity, scattering it to right and left to still the ambition of the Public Prosecutor or to satisfy the greed of innumerable spies.
What was left over he used for the purpose of pitting the bloodthirsty demagogues one against the other, making of the National Assembly a gigantic bear-den, wherein wild beasts could rend one another limb from limb.
In the meanwhile, what cared he--he said it himself--whether hundreds of innocent martyrs perished miserably and uselessly?
They were the necessary food whereby the Revolution was to be satiated and de Batz' schemes enabled to mature.