he had got his fiddle from it was difficult to imagine: it gave forth sounds now creaking, now wheezing, anon screeching or howling and always discordant, provoking either laughter or the throwing of miscellaneous missiles at his head. They were all of them a scrubby lot, these musicians, unwashed, unshaven, in ragged breeches above their bare legs, shoes down-at-heel or else sabots, and grubby Phrygian caps adorned with tricolour cockades on their unkempt heads. They called themselves an itinerant orchestra whom the proprietor of the restaurant had enticed into the place under promise of a hot supper, and they were obviously doing their best to earn it:
"Le chat qui la regarde, Et ron et ron petit pataplon."
"That rascal over there should be made to do honest work," Conty grunted, after he had made several vain attempts to shout the musicians down. "I call it an outrage on the country for a big hulking fellow like that to scrape a fiddle and ogle the girls when he should be training to fight the English."
"To fight the English?" Maurin interposed. "What do you mean, citizen?"
He and Conty had a tureen of hot soup on the table between them. Each dipped into it with a big ladle and filled up his plate to the rim. The soup was very hot and they blew on their spoons before conveying them to their mouths.
The musicians lifted up their cracked voices with a hoot and a cheer, whilst the chorus took up the lively tune:
"Le chat qui la regarde D'un petit air fripon, pon, pon, D'un petit air fripon,"
and the leader of the band, suiting the action to the word, cast side glances on the girls with an air as roguish as that of the cheese-maker's cat.
"What do you mean, Citizen Conty," the young lawyer reiterated, "by talking about fighting the English?"
"Just what I say," Conty replied. "We shall be at war with those barbarians before the month is out."
"Who told you that?"
"You'll hear of it, citizen lawyer. Ill news travels apace."
"But how did you know?" Maurin insisted.
"We government agents," Conty observed loftily, "know these things long before you ordinary people do."
"But..."
"As a matter of fact," the other now condescended to explain, "I was in Paris this morning. I met a number of deputies. There will be a debate about the whole affair in the Convention to-night. Citizen Chauvelin," he went on confidentially, "is back from London since the twenty-first. His work over there is finished, and he is travelling round the country on propaganda work for the government. Secret service, you know. I spoke with him. He told me he would be in Choisy to-night to have a look round. Now, you see," Conty concluded, as he attacked the savoury onion pie, "why I want to get all these fools into the right frame of mind. We want to show Paris what Choisy can do. What?"
"Chauvelin?" Maurin mused. "I've heard about him."
"And you'll see him presently. A clever fellow, but hard as steel. He was sent to England to represent our government, but he didn't stay long, and, name of a dog, how he does hate the English!"
The musicians had just led off with the last verse of the popular ditty:
"La bergère en colère, Et ron, et ron, petit pataplon,"
when Conty jumped to his feet, and with a hasty: "There he is!" pushed his way through the crowd towards the door.
Arman Chauvelin, ex-envoy of the revolutionary government at the Court of St. James, had just returned from England, a sadder and wider man: somewhat discredited perhaps, owing to his repeated failures in bringing the noted English spy, known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, to book, but nevertheless still standing high in the Councils of the various Committees, not only because of his great abilities, but because of his well-known hatred for the spy who had baffled him. He was still an important member of the Central Committee of Public Safety, and as such both respected and feared wherever he went.
Conty, the political agitator, was all obsequiousness when greeting this important personage. He conducted Citizen Chauvelin to the table where Louis Maurin had also finished eating, presented him to the lawyer, after which the two men pressed the newcomer to partake of supper as their guest. Chauvelin refused. He was not staying in Choisy this night, having other business to attend to, he said, in the Loiret district. He wouldn't even sit down. Despite his small, spare figure, he looked strangely impressive in his quietude, and, dressed as he was in sober black, amidst this noisy, excited crowd, many inquisitive glances were turned on him as he stood there. His thin white hands were clasped behind his back and he was listening to the answers which Conty and Maurin gave him in reply to his enquiries about the temper of the people in Choisy, and to their story of the outrage perpetrated on Docteur Pradel by the ci-devant Marquis up at La Rodière. This story interested him; he encouraged Conty in his efforts to keep the excitement of the populace at boiling point, and to inflame as far as possible the hatred of the people against the aristos. An armed raid on the château, he thought, would be a good move, if properly engineered, and as he intended to be back in Choisy in a couple of days, he desired the project to be put off until his return. He wouldn't listen to Maurin's objections to the raid.
"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 Dr. 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 sideboards, and on the 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 chaton, ton, ton, Tua son petit chaton."
Chauvelin had real difficulty in pushing his way through this dense throng. He felt dazed, what with the noise and with 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 hundred 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. Everyone was shouting at the top of his voice:
"Il était 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 would call it, at La Rodière."