"The Scarlet Pimpernel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Orczy Baroness)

XXVIII. THE PERE BLANCHARD'S HUT
XXIX. TRAPPED
XXX. THE SCHOONER
XXXI. THE ESCAPE




THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL




CHAPTER I PARIS: SEPTEMBER, 1792



A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human
only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage
creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and
of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the
West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant
raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.

During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been
kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the
past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her
desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at
this late hour of the day because there were other more interesting
sights for the people to witness, a little while before the final
closing of the barricades for the night.

And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Greve and
made for the various barricades in order to watch this interesting and
amusing sight.

It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such
fools! They were traitors to the people of course, all of them, men,
women, and children, who happened to be descendants of the great men
who since the Crusades had made the glory of France: her old
NOBLESSE. Their ancestors had oppressed the people, had crushed
them under the scarlet heels of their dainty buckled shoes, and now
the people had become the rulers of France and crushed their former
masters--not beneath their heel, for they went shoeless mostly in
these days--but a more effectual weight, the knife of the guillotine.

And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed
its many victims--old men, young women, tiny children until the day
when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful
young Queen.