"Those aristos at La Rodière interest me," he said. "There is an old woman, you say?"

"Yes," Conty informed him; "the ci-devant Marquise, the mother of the present young cub who thrashed Docteur Pradel."

"And there is a girl? A young girl?"

"Yes, Citizen, and two old aides-ménage. But they are harmless enough."

"It would be so much better-" Maurin ventured to say.

"I was not asking your opinion, Citizen Lawyer," Chauvelin broke in haughtily. "What I've said, I've said. Prepare the way, Citizen Conty," he went on, "and as soon as I am back in Choisy I will let you know. If I mistake not," he added under his breath, almost as if he didn't wish the others to hear what he was saying, "we shall have some fun over that raid at La Rodière. An old woman, a young girl, two old servants! The very people to arouse the sympathy of our gallant English spies."

He nodded to the two men and turned to go. The crowd in the small restaurant was more dense than ever. People were sitting on the tables, the side-boards, and on top of one another. The musicians had just played the last bar of the favoured tune, the chorus of which was bawled out by the enthusiastic crowd, to the accompaniment of thunderous handclaps and banging of miscellaneous tools on any surface that happened to be handy:

"La bergère en colère,

Tua son petit chanton, ton, ton,

Tua son petit chanton."

Chauvelin had real difficulty in pushing his way through the dense throng. The vociferous shouts that filled the low room with a clamour that was deafening made him quite giddy. He would have liked to put his hands to his ears, but he had need of his elbows to get along at all. He felt dazed, what with the noise and the smell of stale food and of unwashed humanity ; at any rate, he put his curious experience down to an addled state of his brain, for while he was being pushed and jostled, and only saw individual faces through a kind of haze made of dust and fumes, he suddenly felt as if a pair of eyes, one pair only, was looking at him out of the hundreds that were there. Of course, it was only a hallucination : he was sure it was, and yet for some reason or other he felt a cold shiver running down his spine. He tried to recapture the glance of those eyes, but no one now in the crowd seemed to be looking at him. The musicians had finished playing, or rather they tried to finish playing, but their audience wouldn't allow them to. Every one was shouting at the top of his voice :

"Ilétait une bergère."

They wanted the whole of the six verses all over again.

Chauvelin got as far as the door, was on the point of opening it when a sound-the sound he hated more than any on earth-reached his ear above the din: it was a loud, prolonged, rather inane burst of laughter. Chauvelin did not swear, nor did he shiver again: his nerves were suddenly quite steady, and if he could have translated his thoughts into words, he would have said with a chuckle: "I was right, then! and you are here, my gallant friend, at your old tricks again. Well, since you wish it, à nous deux once more, and I think I may promise you some fun, as you call it, at La Rodière."

19 THE LEAGUE

Although Choisy is only twelve or fifteen kilometres from Paris, it was in those days just a small provincial town, with its Hôtel de Ville and its Committee of Public Safety sitting there, its Grand' Place, its ancient castle then used as a prison, and its famous bridge across the Seine. To the south and west of the Grand' Place there were two or three residential streets with a few substantial, stone-built houses, the homes of professional men, or of tradespeople who had retired on a competence, and farther along a few isolated, poorer-looking houses, such a one as old Levet's lying back from the road behind a small grille and a tiny front garden. But all these features only covered a small area, round which stretched fields and spinneys, with here and there a cottage for the most part roofless and derelict.

It was in one of these dilapidated cottages which stood in a meadow about half-way between Choisy and the height on which was perched the Château de la Rodière, that what looked like a troupe of itinerant musicians had sought shelter against the cold. They had made up a fire in the wide open hearth; the smoke curled up the chimney, and they sat round with their knees drawn up to their chins and their arms encircling their knees. It was the middle of the morning. The wintry dawn had been fine, but already its beauty had gone: ugly grey clouds gathered overhead, and a few thin flakes of snow were beginning to fall. The men sitting there appeared to be waiting for something or someone. They didn't say much: one or two of them were smoking clay-pipes, others were munching bits of stale bread or scraps of cheese which they drew out of their pockets. There were four of them altogether inside the cottage, and one sat outside on a broken-down stool propped against the wall, apparently on the watch. They all looked as if they had just donned such garments as they happened to picked up in an old clothes dealer's shop-a blouse, or a knitted vest, sabots or shoes down at heel, and breeches very much the worse for wear. In a corner of the room a number of musical instruments were piled up, a miscellaneous collection of violin, guitar, trumpet and drum. Precariously perched on top of this pile of rubbish sat Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart., the most fastidious dandy fashionable London had ever known, the arbiter of elegance, the friend of the Prince of Wales, the adored of every woman in England. He too was unwashed, unkempt, unshaved, his slender hands, those hands a queen had once termed exquisite, were covered with grime, his nails were in the deepest mourning. He wore a tattered blouse, sabots stuffed with straw on his bare feet, threadbare breeches and on his head a Phrygian cap which had once been red. At the moment he was scraping a fiddle, drawing from it wailing sounds that provoked loud groans from his friends and an occasional missile hurled at his head.

"Percy, if you don't leave off . . ." one of them threatened, and shied a mouldy piece of cheese at his chief.

"What will you do if I don't?" Sir Percy countered, and successfully dodged the missile, "for I am not going to leave off. I must get this demmed tune right, as we surely will be made to play it presently."

He went on scraping the opening bars of the new "Marseillaise."

"We are in for some fine sport, I imagine, what?" Lord Anthony Dewhurst remarked, and dug his teeth into a hard apple, which he had just extracted from his breeches' pocket.

"Tony," one of the others demanded-it was my Lord Hastings, "where did you get that apple?"

"My sweetheart gave it me. She stole it from her neighbour's garden . . ."

My Lord Tony got no further. He was attacked all at once from three sides. Three pairs of hands were stretched out to wrest the apple from him.

They were just a lot of schoolboys on the spree, these men, enjoying this life of voluntary penury and intense discomfort, sometimes even of starvation and always of short-commons, for it was not always thought advisable for the type of ragamuffin that they appeared to be to buy sufficient food in the markets, in places where the movements of every man, woman and child were known and reported to the police. But they didn't mind. They loved it all. It was such sport, they said, and all in the wake of their chief whom they would follow to the death.

"We are in for some fine sport!" Lord Tony had declared, before the attack on his apple was launched. He held it up at arm's length, trying to rescue it from his assailants who made grabs at it and invariably got in one another's way, until a firm hand finally seized it and Blakeney's pleasant drawly voice was raised to say: