The Scarlet Pimpernel--English spy or hero, as he was alternately called--had helped many a family with pronounced royalist tendencies to escape the fury of the blood-thirsty Terrorists.
Thus gradually the anti-revolutionaries had been weeded out of the city: some by death and imprisonment, others by flight.

Boulogne became the hotbed of anarchism: the idlers and loafers, inseparable from any town where there is a garrison and a harbour, practically ruled the city now.
Denunciations were the order of the day.

Everyone who owned any money, or lived with any comfort was accused of being a traitor and suspected of conspiracy.

The fisher folk wandered about the city, surly and discontented: their trade was at a standstill, but there was a trifle to be earned by giving information: information which meant the arrest, ofttimes the death of men, women and even children who had tried to seek safety in flight, and to denounce whom--as they were trying to hire a boat anywhere along the coast--meant a good square meal for a starving family.
Then came the awful cataclysm.
A woman--a stranger--had been arrested and imprisoned in the Fort Gayole and the town-crier publicly proclaimed that if she escaped from jail, one member of every family in the town--rich or poor, republican or royalist, Catholic or free-thinker--would be summarily guillotined.
That member, the bread-winner! "Why, then, with the Duvals it would be young Francois-Auguste.

He keeps his old mother with his boot-making..." "And it would be Marie Lebon, she has her blind father dependent on her net-mending." "And old Mother Laferriere, whose grandchildren were left penniless...
she keeps them from starvation by her wash-tub." "But Francois-Auguste is a real Republican; he belongs to the Jacobin Club." "And look at Pierre, who never meets a calotin but he must needs spit on him." "Is there no safety anywhere ?...