Page:The Elusive Pimpernel.djvu/11

THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL 11

character, but of the new religion which destroyed and desecrated and never knelt in worship,

Citizen Chaumette's Goddess of Reason by all means — Henriot conceded that the idea was a good one — but the goddess merely as a figure-head : around her a procession of unfrocked and apostate priests, typifying the destruction of ancient hierarchy, mules carrying loads of sacred vessels, the spoils of ten thousand churches of France, and ballet girls in bacchanalian robes, dancing the carmagnole around the new deity.

Public Prosecutor, Foucquier Tinville, thought all these schemes very tame. Why should the people of France be led to think that the era of a new religion would mean an era of milk and water, of pageants and of fireworks? Let every man, woman and child know that this was an era of blood, of blood and again of blood.

"Oh!" he exclaimed in passionate accents, "would that all the traitors in France had but one head, that it might be cut off with one blow of the guillotine!"

He approved of the National fete, but he desired an apotheosis of the guillotine; he undertook to find ten thousand traitors to be beheaded on one grand and glorious day: ten thousand heads to adorn the Place de la Revolution on a great, never-to-be-forgotten evening, after the guillotine had accomplished this record work.

But Collot d'Herbois would also have his say. Collot lately hailed from the South, with a reputation for ferocity unparalleled throughout the whole of this horrible decade, He would not be outdone by Tinville's bloodthirsty schemes.

He was the inventor of the "Noyades," which had been so successful at Lyons and Marseilles. "Why not give the inhabitants of Paris one of these exhilarat- ing spectacles?" he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh

Then he explained his invention of which he was