The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel quotes

But ambition is the one vice to which the generality of mankind will always accord homage, and Robespierre, by gaining the victory over his one in the Convention, in the Clubs and in the Committees, had tacitly agreed to obey.

The tyrant out of his vaulting ambition had brought forth the slaves.

Faint hearted and servile, they brooded over their wrongs, gazed with smouldering wrath on Danton’s vacant seat in the Convention, which no one cared to fill.

“

A gnat may wield a poisoned dart.

The spirits have spoken. Heed their warning, O Chosen of the People! Destroy the Englishman ere he destroy thee!”

“

Pardi! but here’s a man who will not give maman guillotine any trouble!

”

And all the while, the people were shouting:

The Fraternal Supper was interrupted.

Men and women pushed and jostled and screamed, the while a small, spare figure in dark cloth coat and immaculate breeches, with smooth brown hair and pale-ascetic face, stood for a moment under the lintel of a gaping porte-cochère. He had two friends with him;

To entice a man—whoever he was—into making love to her, and then to betray him to his death, was in itself an abhorrent idea. What she might do if actual danger of death threatened her, she did not know.

No human soul can with certainty say, “I would not do this or that, under any circumstances whatever!” Circumstance and impulse are the only two forces that create cowards or heroes.

Principles, willpower, virtue, are really subservient to those two. If they prove the stronger, everything in man must yield to them.

Theresia Cabarrus was a clever woman, and by speaking the word “ridicule,” she had touched the one weak chink in the tyrant’s armour.

But it is not always safe to prod a tiger, even with a child’s cane, or even from behind protecting bars.

Tallien knew this well enough. He was on tenterhooks, longing to see the others depart so that he might throw himself once again at Theresia’s feet and implore her to obey the despot’s commands.

“You will not betray me—to the police?”

“I have never betrayed a woman in my life.”

“Or to Lady Blakeney?” she insisted.

“By Gad!” he exclaimed. “But you are a clever woman!”

“Nay: you need have no fear, fair one! I am a lover of sport. I’ll not betray you.”

She frowned, really puzzled this time.

“I know that,” the old woman rejoined dryly. “If she escapes ’twill not be through my connivance.”

“In the service of the State,” Chauvelin riposted, “even carelessness becomes a crime.”

Catherine Théot was silent for a moment or two, pressed her thin lips together; then rejoined quite quietly:

Mother Théot shrugged her shoulders.

“Does one ever know which is the Englishman and which is the asthmatic Rateau?”

she queried, with a dry laugh.

“ ’Tis not for me to argue, citizen,” Chazot rejoined, with a careless shrug of the shoulders. “If you tell me to take citizen Rateau over to the veterinary at the cavalry barracks and have him branded like cattle, why …”

“Not like cattle, citizen,” Chauvelin broke in blandly.

“You shall commence proceedings by administering to citizen Rateau a whole bottle of excellent eau-de-vie, at the Government’s expense.

“And you will still be wearing the worst-cut pair of breeches it has ever been my bad fortune to behold,” Sir Percy retorted, quite unruffled.

“Lud love you, man! Have you guillotined all the good tailors in Paris?”

“You choose to be flippant, Sir Percy,” Chauvelin rejoined dryly. “But, though you have chosen for the past few years to play the role of a brainless nincompoop, I have cause to know that behind your affectations there lurks an amount of sound common sense.”

“There, as elsewhere, you succeeded in circumventing me, Sir Percy.”

“No, no!” he protested. “Not in circumventing you. Only in making you look a demmed fool!”

“Call it that, if you like, sir,” Chauvelin admitted, with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. “Luck has favoured you many a time.

… shaking, and faint and helpless, he finally collapsed upon the nearest bench, the while Sir Percy straightened out his tall figure, with unruffled composure rubbed his slender hands one against the other, as if to free them from dust, and said, with gentle, good-humoured sarcasm:

“Do put your cravat straight, man! You look a disgusting object!”

He dragged the corner of a bench forward, sat astride upon it, and waited with perfect sangfroid, spyglass in hand, while Chauvelin mechanically readjusted the set of his clothes.

“Oh!” he said.

“Does a man ever hate a pretty woman?”

“He forgives her, milor,” she entreated, “if he is a true sportsman.”

“You are mad, milor!” she said, in a choked murmur. “Such foolhardiness, when your life is in deadly jeopardy, becomes criminal folly—”

“The best of life,” he said airily, “is folly. I would not miss this moment for a kingdom!”

She felt like a creature under a spell. He took her hand and drew it through his arm. She went up the steps beside him.

“You must know that every second which you spend in this house is fraught with the greatest possible danger.”

“Danger? Ne’er a bit, dear lady! I am no longer in danger, now that you are my friend.”

The next moment he was gone. For awhile, Theresia’s straining ears still caught the sound of his firm footfall upon the stone steps. Then all was still;

Forgery?” he went on, with passionate earnestness. “Why not? Outrage? Murder? I would commit every crime in order to serve the country which I love, and hound her enemies to death.

The only crime that is unjustifiable, citoyenne, is indifference.

You? Not bound? Wait! Wait, I say!

“Ah!” the imperious beauty retorted, with a thought of spite in her mellow voice. “Would you could give him a potion, Mother, to cure him of his infatuation for me!”

“Despise no man’s love, citoyenne,” the witch retorted sententiously.

“Even that poor vagabond’s blind passion may yet prove thy salvation.”

… in the stage and in the audience, at this moment when every man’s head was insecure upon his shoulders and no man knew whether on reaching home he would not find a posse of the National Guard waiting to convey him to the nearest prison.

Death indeed lurked everywhere.

The evening before, at a supper party given in the house of deputy Barrère, a paper was said to have dropped out of Robespierre’s coat pocket, and been found by one of the guests. The paper contained nothing but just forty names.

“You can do anything with that crowd, citizen! You hold the people by the magnetism of your presence and of your voice. There is no height to which you cannot aspire.”

“The greater the height,” he murmured moodily, “the dizzier the fall⁠ ⁠…”

“ ’Tis on the summit you should gaze,” she retorted; “not on the abyss below.”

“The greater the height,” he murmured moodily, “the dizzier the fall …”

“ ’Tis on the summit you should gaze,” she retorted; “not on the abyss below.”

“I prefer to gaze into the loveliest eyes in Paris,” he replied with a clumsy attempt at gallantry; “and remain blind to the summits as well as to the depths.”

The dream was over! It would never come again. He himself had wakened her; he himself had cast the die which must end his splendid life, even at the hour when love and fortune smiled at him through the lips and eyes of beautiful Cabarrus.

Fate, in the guise of the one man she could have loved, was throwing Theresia into the arms of Robespierre.

The next moment she was rudely awakened from her dreams. The door of her box was torn open by a violent hand, and turning, she saw Bertrand Moncrif, hatless, with hair dishevelled, clothes dripping and mud-stained, and linen soaked through.

Theresia looked on him for a few seconds in silence, then she gave a ringing laugh, and with exquisite bare arm outstretched she pointed to the scrubby apparition.

“That man’s word against mine!” she called, with well-assumed mockery. “Rateau, the caitiff against Theresia Cabarrus, the intimate friend of citizen Robespierre! What a subject for a lampoon!”

Then her laughter broke. She turned once more on Chauvelin like an angry goddess.

“Unless what?” Tallien queried, and hung breathless on the man’s lips as he would on those of an oracle.

“Theresia Cabarrus, or Robespierre and his herd of assassins. Which shall it be, citizen Tallien?”

“By Heaven!—” Tallien exclaimed forcefully.

Behold the picture! A medley. A confusion. A whirl of everything that is passionate and cruel, defiant and desperate. Heavens, how desperate!

Men who have thrown lives away as if lives were in truth grains of sand; men who have juggled with death dealt it and tossed it about like cards upon a gaming table.

They are desperate now, because their own lives are at stake; and they find now that life can be very dear.

His face is the colour of ashes, and his eyes, ringed with purple, gleam with an unnatural fire.

The coward has become bold; the sheep has donned the lion’s skin.

There is a flutter in the Convention, a moment’s hesitation. But the question is put to the vote, and the speech is not to be printed.

That is the picture as it has been painted in the minds of the tyrant and of his sycophants: a picture of death paramount, and of Robespierre rising like a new Phoenix from out the fire of calumny and revolt, greater, more unassailable than before.

And lo! One sweep of the brush, and the picture is changed.

Ten minutes … less … and the whole course of the world’s history is altered. No sooner had St. Just mounted the tribune than Tallien jumped to his feet.

And lo! One sweep of the brush, and the picture is changed.

Ten minutes⁠ ⁠… less⁠ ⁠… and the whole course of the world’s history is altered.

No sooner had St. Just mounted the tribune than Tallien jumped to his feet. His voice, usually meek and cultured, rises in a harsh crescendo, until it drowns that of the younger orator.

But the bell goes jingling on, and Robespierre, choked with rage and terror, “turns blue” we are told, and his hand goes up to his throat.

“The blood of Danton chokes thee!” cries one man.

And these words seem like the last blow dealt to the fallen foe. The next moment the voice of an obscure Deputy is raised, in order to speak the words that have been hovering on every lip: