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

round Bibot's gate was eager and excited. The lust of blood grows
with its satisfaction, there is no satiety: the crowd had seen a
hundred noble heads fall beneath the guillotine to-day, it wanted to
make sure that it would see another hundred fall on the morrow.

Bibot was sitting on an overturned and empty cask close by the
gate of the barricade; a small detachment of citoyen soldiers was
under his command. The work had been very hot lately. Those cursed
aristos were becoming terrified and tried their hardest to slip out of
Paris: men, women and children, whose ancestors, even in remote ages,
had served those traitorous Bourbons, were all traitors themselves and
right food for the guillotine. Every day Bibot had had the
satisfaction of unmasking some fugitive royalists and sending them
back to be tried by the Committee of Public Safety, presided over by
that good patriot, Citoyen Foucquier-Tinville.

Robespierre and Danton both had commended Bibot for his zeal
and Bibot was proud of the fact that he on his own initiative had sent
at least fifty aristos to the guillotine.

But to-day all the sergeants in command at the various
barricades had had special orders. Recently a very great number of
aristos had succeeded in escaping out of France and in reaching
England safely. There were curious rumours about these escapes; they
had become very frequent and singularly daring; the people's minds
were becoming strangely excited about it all. Sergeant Grospierre had
been sent to the guillotine for allowing a whole family of aristos to
slip out of the North Gate under his very nose.

It was asserted that these escapes were organised by a band of
Englishmen, whose daring seemed to be unparalleled, and who, from
sheer desire to meddle in what did not concern them, spent their spare
time in snatching away lawful victims destined for Madame la
Guillotine. These rumours soon grew in extravagance; there was no
doubt that this band of meddlesome Englishmen did exist; moreover,
they seemed to be under the leadership of a man whose pluck and
audacity were almost fabulous. Strange stories were afloat of how he
and those aristos whom he rescued became suddenly invisible as they
reached the barricades and escaped out of the gates by sheer
supernatural agency.

No one had seen these mysterious Englishmen; as for their
leader, he was never spoken of, save with a superstitious shudder.
Citoyen Foucquier-Tinville would in the course of the day receive a
scrap of paper from some mysterious source; sometimes he would find it
in the pocket of his coat, at others it would be handed to him by
someone in the crowd, whilst he was on his way to the sitting of the
Committee of Public Safety. The paper always contained a brief notice
that the band of meddlesome Englishmen were at work, and it was always
signed with a device drawn in red--a little star-shaped flower, which