



Produced by J.C. Byers and L.M. Shaf





THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL

By Baroness Orczy




Contents


     I.       Paris: 1793
     II.      A Retrospect
     III.     Ex-Ambassador Chauvelin
     IV.      The Richmond Gala
     V.       Sir Percy and His Lady
     VI.      For the Poor of Paris
     VII.     Premonition
     VIII.    The Invitation
     IX.      Demoiselle Candeille
     X.       Lady Blakeney's Rout
     XI.      The Challenge
     XII.     Time -- Place -- Conditions
     XIII.    Reflections
     XIV.     The Ruling Passion
     XV.      Farewell
     XVI.     The Passport
     XVII.    Boulogne
     XVIII.   No. 6
     XIX.     The Strength of the Weak
     XX.      Triumph
     XXI.     Suspense
     XXII.    Not Death
     XXIII.   The Hostage
     XXIV.    Colleagues
     XXV.     The Unexpected
     XXVI.    The Terms of the Bargain
     XXVII.   The Decision
     XXVIII.  The Midnight Watch
     XXIX.    The National Fete
     XXX.     The Procession
     XXXI.    Final Dispositions
     XXXII.   The Letter
     XXXIII.  The English Spy
     XXXIV.   The Angelus
     XXXV.    Marguerite





Chapter I: Paris: 1793

There was not even a reaction.

On! ever on! in that wild, surging torrent; sowing the wind of anarchy,
of terrorism, of lust of blood and hate, and reaping a hurricane of
destruction and of horror.

On! ever on! France, with Paris and all her children still rushes
blindly, madly on; defies the powerful coalition,--Austria, England,
Spain, Prussia, all joined together to stem the flow of carnage,--defies
the Universe and defies God!

Paris this September 1793!--or shall we call it Vendemiaire, Year I.
of the Republic?--call it what we will! Paris! a city of bloodshed, of
humanity in its lowest, most degraded aspect. France herself a gigantic
self-devouring monster, her fairest cities destroyed, Lyons razed to the
ground, Toulon, Marseilles, masses of blackened ruins, her bravest sons
turned to lustful brutes or to abject cowards seeking safety at the cost
of any humiliation.

That is thy reward, oh mighty, holy Revolution! apotheosis of equality
and fraternity! grand rival of decadent Christianity.

Five weeks now since Marat, the bloodthirsty Friend of the People,
succumbed beneath the sheath-knife of a virgin patriot, a month since
his murderess walked proudly, even enthusiastically, to the guillotine!
There has been no reaction--only a great sigh!... Not of content or
satisfied lust, but a sigh such as the man-eating tiger might heave
after his first taste of long-coveted blood.

A sigh for more!

A king on the scaffold; a queen degraded and abased, awaiting death,
which lingers on the threshold of her infamous prison; eight hundred
scions of ancient houses that have made the history of France; brave
generals, Custine, Blanchelande, Houchard, Beauharnais; worthy patriots,
noble-hearted women, misguided enthusiasts, all by the score and by the
hundred, up the few wooden steps which lead to the guillotine.

An achievement of truth!

And still that sigh for more!

But for the moment,--a few seconds only,--Paris looked round her mighty
self, and thought things over!

The man-eating tiger for the space of a sigh licked his powerful jaws
and pondered!

Something new!--something wonderful!

We have had a new Constitution, a new Justice, new Laws, a new Almanack!

What next?

Why, obviously!--How comes it that great, intellectual, aesthetic Paris
never thought of such a wonderful thing before?

A new religion!

Christianity is old and obsolete, priests are aristocrats, wealthy
oppressors of the People, the Church but another form of wanton tyranny.

Let us by all means have a new religion.

Already something has been done to destroy the old! To destroy! always
to destroy! Churches have been ransacked, altars spoliated, tombs
desecrated, priests and curates murdered; but that is not enough.

There must be a new religion; and to attain that there must be a new
God.

"Man is a born idol-worshipper."

Very well then! let the People have a new religion and a new God.

Stay!--Not a God this time!--for God means Majesty, Power, Kingship!
everything in fact which the mighty hand of the people of France has
struggled and fought to destroy.

Not a God, but a goddess.

A goddess! an idol! a toy! since even the man-eating tiger must play
sometimes.

Paris wanted a new religion, and a new toy, and grave men, ardent
patriots, mad enthusiasts, sat in the Assembly of the Convention and
seriously discussed the means of providing her with both these things
which she asked for.

Chaumette, I think it was, who first solved the difficulty:--Procureur
Chaumette, head of the Paris Municipality, he who had ordered that
the cart which bore the dethroned queen to the squalid prison of the
Conciergerie should be led slowly past her own late palace of the
Tuileries, and should be stopped there just long enough for her to see
and to feel in one grand mental vision all that she had been when she
dwelt there, and all that she now was by the will of the People.

Chaumette, as you see, was refined, artistic;--the torture of the fallen
Queen's heart meant more to him than a blow of the guillotine on her
neck.

No wonder, therefore, that it was Procureur Chaumette who first
discovered exactly what type of new religion Paris wanted just now.

"Let us have a Goddess of Reason," he said, "typified if you will by
the most beautiful woman in Paris. Let us have a feast of the Goddess of
Reason, let there be a pyre of all the gew-gaws which for centuries
have been flaunted by overbearing priests before the eyes of starving
multitudes, let the People rejoice and dance around that funeral pile,
and above it all let the new Goddess tower smiling and triumphant. The
Goddess of Reason! the only deity our new and regenerate France shall
acknowledge throughout the centuries which are to come!"

Loud applause greeted the impassioned speech.

"A new goddess, by all means!" shouted the grave gentlemen of the
National Assembly, "the Goddess of Reason!"

They were all eager that the People should have this toy; something to
play with and to tease, round which to dance the mad Carmagnole and sing
the ever-recurring "Ca ira."

Something to distract the minds of the populace from the consequences of
its own deeds, and the helplessness of its legislators.

Procureur Chaumette enlarged upon his original idea; like a true artist
who sees the broad effect of a picture at a glance and then fills in the
minute details, he was already busy elaborating his scheme.

"The goddess must be beautiful... not too young... Reason can only go
hand in hand with the riper age of second youth... she must be decked
out in classical draperies, severe yet suggestive... she must be rouged
and painted... for she is a mere idol... easily to be appeased with
incense, music and laughter."

He was getting deeply interested in his subject, seeking minutiae of
detail, with which to render his theme more and more attractive.

But patience was never the characteristic of the Revolutionary
Government of France. The National Assembly soon tired of Chaumette's
dithyrambic utterances. Up aloft on the Mountain, Danton was yawning
like a gigantic leopard.

Soon Henriot was on his feet. He had a far finer scheme than that of
the Procureur to place before his colleagues. A grand National fete,
semi-religious in 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 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 exhilarating spectacles?" he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh.

Then he explained his invention, of which he was inordinately proud.
Some two or three hundred traitors, men, women, and children, tied
securely together with ropes in great, human bundles and thrown upon a
barge in the middle of the river: the barge with a hole in her bottom!
not too large! only sufficient to cause her to sink slowly, very slowly,
in sight of the crowd of delighted spectators.

The cries of the women and children, and even of the men, as they felt
the waters rising and gradually enveloping them, as they felt themselves
powerless even for a fruitless struggle, had proved most exhilarating,
so Citizen Collot declared, to the hearts of the true patriots of Lyons.

Thus the discussion continued.

This was the era when every man had but one desire, that of outdoing
others in ferocity and brutality, and but one care, that of saving his
own head by threatening that of his neighbour.

The great duel between the Titanic leaders of these turbulent parties,
the conflict between hot-headed Danton on the one side and cold-blooded
Robespierre on the other, had only just begun; the great, all-devouring
monsters had dug their claws into one another, but the issue of the
combat was still at stake.

Neither of these two giants had taken part in these deliberations anent
the new religion and the new goddess. Danton gave signs now and then
of the greatest impatience, and muttered something about a new form of
tyranny, a new kind of oppression.

On the left, Robespierre in immaculate sea-green coat and carefully
gauffered linen was quietly polishing the nails of his right hand
against the palm of his left.

But nothing escaped him of what was going on. His ferocious egoism, his
unbounded ambition was even now calculating what advantages to himself
might accrue from this idea of the new religion and of the National
fete, what personal aggrandisement he could derive therefrom.

The matter outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen and
calculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to place
him--Robespierre--on a yet higher and more unassailable pinnacle.

Surrounded by those who hated him, those who envied and those who feared
him, he ruled over them all by the strength of his own cold-blooded
savagery, by the resistless power of his merciless cruelty.

He cared about nobody but himself, about nothing but his own exaltation:
every action of his career, since he gave up his small practice in a
quiet provincial town in order to throw himself into the wild vortex
of revolutionary politics, every word he ever uttered had but one
aim--Himself.

He saw his colleagues and comrades of the old Jacobin Clubs ruthlessly
destroyed around him: friends he had none, and all left him indifferent;
and now he had hundreds of enemies in every assembly and club in Paris,
and these too one by one were being swept up in that wild whirlpool
which they themselves had created.

Impassive, serene, always ready with a calm answer, when passion
raged most hotly around him, Robespierre, the most ambitious, most
self-seeking demagogue of his time, had acquired the reputation of being
incorruptible and selfless, an enthusiastic servant of the Republic.

The sea-green Incorruptible!

And thus whilst others talked and argued, waxed hot over schemes for
processions and pageantry, or loudly denounced the whole matter as the
work of a traitor, he, of the sea-green coat, sat quietly polishing his
nails.

But he had already weighed all these discussions in the balance of his
mind, placed them in the crucible of his ambition, and turned them into
something that would benefit him and strengthen his position.

Aye! the feast should be brilliant enough! gay or horrible, mad or
fearful, but through it all the people of France must be made to feel
that there was a guiding hand which ruled the destinies of all, a head
which framed the new laws, which consolidated the new religion and
established its new goddess: the Goddess of Reason.

Robespierre, her prophet!




Chapter II: A Retrospect



The room was close and dark, filled with the smoke from a defective
chimney.

A tiny boudoir, once the dainty sanctum of imperious Marie Antoinette; a
faint and ghostly odour, like unto the perfume of spectres, seemed still
to cling to the stained walls, and to the torn Gobelin tapestries.

Everywhere lay the impress of a heavy and destroying hand: that of the
great and glorious Revolution.

In the mud-soiled corners of the room a few chairs, with brocaded
cushions rudely torn, leant broken and desolate against the walls. A
small footstool, once gilt-legged and satin-covered, had been overturned
and roughly kicked to one side, and there it lay on its back, like some
little animal that had been hurt, stretching its broken limbs upwards,
pathetic to behold.

From the delicately wrought Buhl table the silver inlay had been harshly
stripped out of its bed of shell.

Across the Lunette, painted by Boucher and representing a chaste
Diana surrounded by a bevy of nymphs, an uncouth hand had scribbled in
charcoal the device of the Revolution: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite
ou la Mort; whilst, as if to give a crowning point to the work of
destruction and to emphasise its motto, someone had decorated the
portrait of Marie Antoinette with a scarlet cap, and drawn a red and
ominous line across her neck.

And at the table two men were sitting in close and eager conclave.

Between them a solitary tallow candle, unsnuffed and weirdly flickering,
threw fantastic shadows upon the walls, and illumined with fitful and
uncertain light the faces of the two men.

How different were these in character!

One, high cheek-boned, with coarse, sensuous lips, and hair elaborately
and carefully powdered; the other pale and thin-lipped, with the keen
eyes of a ferret and a high intellectual forehead, from which the sleek
brown hair was smoothly brushed away.

The first of these men was Robespierre, the ruthless and incorruptible
demagogue; the other was Citizen Chauvelin, ex-ambassador of the
Revolutionary Government at the English Court.

The hour was late, and the noises from the great, seething city
preparing for sleep came to this remote little apartment in the now
deserted Palace of the Tuileries, merely as a faint and distant echo.

It was two days after the Fructidor Riots. Paul Deroulede and the woman
Juliette Marny, both condemned to death, had been literally spirited
away out of the cart which was conveying them from the Hall of Justice
to the Luxembourg Prison, and news had just been received by the
Committee of Public Safety that at Lyons, the Abbe du Mesnil, with the
ci-devant Chevalier d'Egremont and the latter's wife and family, had
effected a miraculous and wholly incomprehensible escape from the
Northern Prison.

But this was not all. When Arras fell into the hands of the
Revolutionary army, and a regular cordon was formed round the town, so
that not a single royalist traitor might escape, some three score women
and children, twelve priests, the old aristocrats Chermeuil, Delleville
and Galipaux and many others, managed to pass the barriers and were
never recaptured.

Raids were made on the suspected houses: in Paris chiefly where the
escaped prisoners might have found refuge, or better still where their
helpers and rescuers might still be lurking. Foucquier Tinville, Public
Prosecutor, led and conducted these raids, assisted by that bloodthirsty
vampire, Merlin. They heard of a house in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie
where an Englishmen was said to have lodged for two days.

They demanded admittance, and were taken to the rooms where the
Englishman had stayed. These were bare and squalid, like hundreds of
other rooms in the poorer quarters of Paris. The landlady, toothless and
grimy, had not yet tidied up the one where the Englishman had slept: in
fact she did not know he had left for good.

He had paid for his room, a week in advance, and came and went as he
liked, she explained to Citizen Tinville. She never bothered about him,
as he never took a meal in the house, and he was only there two days.
She did not know her lodger was English until the day he left. She
thought he was a Frenchman from the South, as he certainly had a
peculiar accent when he spoke.

"It was the day of the riots," she continued; "he would go out, and I
told him I did not think that the streets would be safe for a foreigner
like him: for he always wore such very fine clothes, and I made sure
that the starving men and women of Paris would strip them off his back
when their tempers were roused. But he only laughed. He gave me a bit of
paper and told me that if he did not return I might conclude that he had
been killed, and if the Committee of Public Safety asked me questions
about me, I was just to show the bit of paper and there would be no
further trouble."

She had talked volubly, more than a little terrified at Merlin's scowls,
and the attitude of Citizen Tinville, who was known to be very severe if
anyone committed any blunders.

But the Citizeness--her name was Brogard and her husband's brother kept
an inn in the neighbourhood of Calais--the Citizeness Brogard had a
clear conscience. She held a license from the Committee of Public Safety
for letting apartments, and she had always given due notice to the
Committee of the arrival and departure of her lodgers. The only thing
was that if any lodger paid her more than ordinarily well for the
accommodation and he so desired it, she would send in the notice
conveniently late, and conveniently vaguely worded as to the
description, status and nationality of her more liberal patrons.

This had occurred in the case of her recent English visitor.

But she did not explain it quite like that to Citizen Foucquier Tinville
or to Citizen Merlin.

However, she was rather frightened, and produced the scrap of paper
which the Englishman had left with her, together with the assurance that
when she showed it there would be no further trouble.

Tinville took it roughly out of her hand, but would not glance at it.
He crushed it into a ball and then Merlin snatched it from him with a
coarse laugh, smoothed out the creases on his knee and studied it for a
moment.

There were two lines of what looked like poetry, written in a language
which Merlin did not understand. English, no doubt.

But what was perfectly clear, and easily comprehended by any one, was
the little drawing in the corner, done in red ink and representing a
small star-shaped flower.

Then Tinville and Merlin both cursed loudly and volubly, and bidding
their men follow them, turned away from the house in the Rue de
l'Ancienne Comedie and left its toothless landlady on her own doorstep
still volubly protesting her patriotism and her desire to serve the
government of the Republic.

Tinville and Merlin, however, took the scrap of paper to Citizen
Robespierre, who smiled grimly as he in his turn crushed the offensive
little document in the palm of his well-washed hands.

Robespierre did not swear. He never wasted either words or oaths, but he
slipped the bit of paper inside the double lid of his silver snuff box
and then he sent a special messenger to Citizen Chauvelin in the Rue
Corneille, bidding him come that same evening after ten o'clock to room
No. 16 in the ci-devant Palace of the Tuileries.

It was now half-past ten, and Chauvelin and Robespierre sat opposite one
another in the ex-boudoir of Queen Marie Antoinette, and between them on
the table, just below the tallow-candle, was a much creased, exceedingly
grimy bit of paper.

It had passed through several unclean hands before Citizen Robespierre's
immaculately white fingers had smoothed it out and placed it before the
eyes of ex-Ambassador Chauvelin.

The latter, however, was not looking at the paper, he was not even
looking at the pale, cruel face before him. He had closed his eyes and
for a moment had lost sight of the small dark room, of Robespierre's
ruthless gaze, of the mud-stained walls and greasy floor. He was seeing,
as in a bright and sudden vision, the brilliantly-lighted salons of the
Foreign Office in London, with beautiful Marguerite Blakeney gliding
queenlike on the arm of the Prince of Wales.

He heard the flutter of many fans, the frou-frou of silk dresses, and
above all the din and sound of dance music, he heard an inane laugh and
an affected voice repeating the doggerel rhyme that was even now written
on that dirty piece of paper which Robespierre had placed before him:

     "We seek him here, and we seek him there,
      Those Frenchies seek him everywhere!
      Is he in heaven, is he in hell,
      That demmed elusive Pimpernel?"

It was a mere flash! One of memory's swiftly effaced pictures, when she
shows us for the fraction of a second, indelible pictures from out our
past. Chauvelin, in that same second, while his own eyes were closed
and Robespierre's fixed upon him, also saw the lonely cliffs of Calais,
heard the same voice singing: "God save the King!" the volley of
musketry, the despairing cries of Marguerite Blakeney; and once again he
felt the keen and bitter pang of complete humiliation and defeat.




Chapter III: Ex-Ambassador Chauvelin



Robespierre had quietly waited the while. He was in no hurry: being a
night-bird of very pronounced tastes, he was quite ready to sit here
until the small hours of the morning watching Citizen Chauvelin mentally
writhing in the throes of recollections of the past few months.

There was nothing that delighted the sea-green Incorruptible quite so
much as the aspect of a man struggling with a hopeless situation and
feeling a net of intrigue drawing gradually tighter and tighter around
him.

Even now, when he saw Chauvelin's smooth forehead wrinkled into an
anxious frown, and his thin hand nervously clutched upon the table,
Robespierre heaved a pleasurable sigh, leaned back in his chair, and
said with an amiable smile:

"You do agree with me, then, Citizen, that the situation has become
intolerable?"

Then as Chauvelin did not reply, he continued, speaking more sharply:

"And how terribly galling it all is, when we could have had that man
under the guillotine by now, if you had not blundered so terribly last
year."

His voice had become hard and trenchant like that knife to which he was
so ready to make constant allusion. But Chauvelin still remained silent.
There was really nothing that he could say.

"Citizen Chauvelin, how you must hate that man!" exclaimed Robespierre
at last.

Then only did Chauvelin break the silence which up to now he had
appeared to have forced himself to keep.

"I do!" he said with unmistakable fervour.

"Then why do you not make an effort to retrieve the blunders of last
year?" queried Robespierre blandly. "The Republic has been unusually
patient and long-suffering with you, Citizen Chauvelin. She has taken
your many services and well-known patriotism into consideration. But
you know," he added significantly, "that she has no use for worthless
tools."

Then as Chauvelin seemed to have relapsed into sullen silence, he
continued with his original ill-omened blandness:

"Ma foi! Citizen Chauvelin, were I standing in your buckled shoes, I
would not lose another hour in trying to avenge mine own humiliation!"

"Have I ever had a chance?" burst out Chauvelin with ill-suppressed
vehemence. "What can I do single-handed? Since war has been declared
I cannot go to England unless the Government will find some official
reason for my doing so. There is much grumbling and wrath over here, and
when that damned Scarlet Pimpernel League has been at work, when a score
or so of valuable prizes have been snatched from under the very knife
of the guillotine, then, there is much gnashing of teeth and useless
cursings, but nothing serious or definite is done to smother those
accursed English flies which come buzzing about our ears."

"Nay! you forget, Citizen Chauvelin," retorted Robespierre, "that we of
the Committee of Public Safety are far more helpless than you. You
know the language of these people, we don't. You know their manners and
customs, their ways of thought, the methods they are likely to employ:
we know none of these things. You have seen and spoken to men in England
who are members of that damned League. You have seen the man who is its
leader. We have not."

He leant forward on the table and looked more searchingly at the thin,
pallid face before him.

"If you named that leader to me now, if you described him, we could
go to work more easily. You could name him, and you would, Citizen
Chauvelin."

"I cannot," retorted Chauvelin doggedly.

"Ah! but I think you could. But there! I do not blame your silence. You
would wish to reap the reward of your own victory, to be the instrument
of your own revenge. Passions! I think it natural! But in the name of
your own safety, Citizen, do not be too greedy with your secret. If the
man is known to you, find him again, find him, lure him to France! We
want him--the people want him! And if the people do not get what they
want, they will turn on those who have withheld their prey."

"I understand, Citizen, that your own safety and that of your government
is involved in this renewed attempt to capture the Scarlet Pimpernel,"
retorted Chauvelin drily.

"And your head, Citizen Chauvelin," concluded Robespierre.

"Nay! I know that well enough, and you may believe me, and you will,
Citizen, when I say that I care but little about that. The question is,
if I am to lure that man to France what will you and your government do
to help me?"

"Everything," replied Robespierre, "provided you have a definite plan
and a definite purpose.

"I have both. But I must go to England in, at least, a semi-official
capacity. I can do nothing if I am to hide in disguise in out-of-the-way
corners."

"That is easily done. There has been some talk with the British
authorities anent the security and welfare of peaceful French subjects
settled in England. After a good deal of correspondence they have
suggested our sending a semi-official representative over there to look
after the interests of our own people commercially and financially.
We can easily send you over in that capacity if it would suit your
purpose."

"Admirably. I have only need of a cloak. That one will do as well as
another."

"Is that all?"

"Not quite. I have several plans in my head, and I must know that I
am fully trusted. Above all, I must have power--decisive, absolute,
illimitable power."

There was nothing of the weakling about this small, sable-clad man, who
looked the redoubtable Jacobin leader straight in the face and brought a
firm fist resolutely down upon the table before him. Robespierre paused
a while ere he replied; he was eying the other man keenly, trying to
read if behind that earnest, frowning brow there did not lurk some
selfish, ulterior motive along with that demand for absolute power.

But Chauvelin did not flinch beneath that gaze which could make every
cheek in France blanch with unnamed terror, and after that slight moment
of hesitation Robespierre said quietly:

"You shall have the complete power of a military dictator in every town
or borough of France which you may visit. The Revolutionary Government
shall create you, before you start for England, Supreme Head of all the
Sub-Committees of Public Safety. This will mean that in the name of the
safety of the Republic every order given by you, of whatsoever nature
it might be, must be obeyed implicitly under pain of an arraignment for
treason."

Chauvelin sighed a quick, sharp sigh of intense satisfaction, which he
did not even attempt to disguise before Robespierre.

"I shall want agents," he said, "or shall we say spies? and, of course,
money."

"You shall have both. We keep a very efficient secret service in
England and they do a great deal of good over there. There is much
dissatisfaction in their Midland counties--you remember the Birmingham
riots? They were chiefly the work of our own spies. Then you know
Candeille, the actress? She had found her way among some of those
circles in London who have what they call liberal tendencies. I believe
they are called Whigs. Funny name, isn't it? It means perruque, I think.
Candeille has given charity performances in aid of our Paris poor,
in one or two of these Whig clubs, and incidentally she has been very
useful to us."

"A woman is always useful in such cases. I shall seek out the Citizeness
Candeille."

"And if she renders you useful assistance, I think I can offer her
what should prove a tempting prize. Women are so vain!" he added,
contemplating with rapt attention the enamel-like polish on his
finger-nails. "There is a vacancy in the Maison