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May I trust you to follow my instructions to the letter? for truly, if you presently ask questions and show curiosity, my head is as good as in Madame Guillotine's basket." "You may trust me," Barrington answered. "Then we may go at once. Good night, Citizen Dubois." "Good night." Through a doorway they passed into a yard shut in by the backs of houses, from which, high up, dim lights glimmered.
Some may have realized that in their indifference lay their safety, but to others such indifference came naturally; their own immediate affairs were all that concerned them. The rabble took no notice of them, they were too insignificant for the nobility to attempt to influence, and they criticised neither the doings of the Convention, nor the guillotine's work, knowing little of either.
This overworked official hastily chalked the sign which meant that a prisoner was marked for next batch of the guillotine's victims, on the inside instead of the outside of Paine's cell-door. Condorcet, in hiding and awaiting death, wrote in these months his Sketch of human progress. Paine, meditating on the end that seemed near, composed the first part of his Age of Reason.
Brooding over the alteration in his future, he exchanged hardly a word with his cousin, during the prolonged journey, which they continued together, as though mutual reluctance to part bound them indissolubly. Logic said there should be a powerful repugnance between those whom the shadow of the guillotine's red arm clouded.
"I made friends with Madame Guillotine's lover," she said with a coarse laugh, "he cut these off for me from the heads as they rolled down. He has promised me some more to-morrow, but I don't know if I shall be at my usual place."
The executioner dropped his arms to his sides and glanced at the three men in speechless amazement. An interruption of the guillotine's deadly work was something that had never yet come his knowledge or experience in the bloody days of the Reign of Terror. He could not comprehend it. The suddenly silenced mob was equally unable to grasp the situation. What could be the matter?
Several of the bayonets speed toward the inert lump, with the intent on the part of their owners to fling the body contemptuously from the scaffold to the floor. But a more refined cruelty speaks: "Save him for the guillotine!" The soldiers leave the crumpled-up, desperately wounded Pierre, dooming him yet to taste La Guillotine's embrace. They subdue de Vaudrey and truss him up anew.
Associating himself with the Girondist party he assisted, busily enthusiastic, at the march of tremendous events, until the evil hour in which friend began to denounce friend, and heads, quite other than aristocratic those of men and women but yesterday the idols and chosen leaders of the people went daily to the filling of la veuve Guillotine's unspeakable market-basket.
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