take it, a woman, whose jealousy was aroused by this mark of favor and preference, dealt the child a kick with her wooden shoe which kept her in bed almost a month. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil bore the marks of the blow all her life. During that month, the whole family would have died of starvation, had it not been for a supply of rice, which one of their acquaintances, the Comtesse d'Auteuil, had had the forethought to lay aside, and which she consented to share with the father and the two children. Thus, Monsieur de Varandeuil escaped the Revolutionary Tribunal by burying himself in obscurity. He escaped it also by reason of the fact that the accounts of his administration of his office were still unsettled, as he had had the good fortune to procure the postponement of the settlement from month to month. Then, too, he kept suspicion at bay by his personal animosity toward some great personages at court, and by the hatred of the queen which many retainers of the king's brothers had conceived. Whenever he had occasion to speak of that wretched woman, he used violent, bitter, insulting words, uttered in such a passionate, sincere tone that they almost made him appear as an enemy of the royal family; so that those to whom he was simply Citizen Roulot looked upon him as a good patriot, and those who knew his former name almost excused him for having been what he had been: a noble, the friend of a prince of the blood, and a place holder. The Republic had reached the epoch of patriotic suppers, those repasts of a whole street in the street; Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, in her confused, terrified reminiscences of those days, could still see the tables on Rue Pavee, with their legs in the streams of the blood of September flowing from La Force! It was at one of these suppers that Monsieur de Varandeuil conceived a scheme that completely assured his immunity. He informed two of his neighbors at table, devoted patriots both, one of whom was on intimate terms with Chaumette, that he was in great embarrassment because his daughter had been privately baptized only, so that she had no civil status, and said that he would be very happy if Chaumette would have her entered on the registers of the municipality and honor her with a name selected by him from the Republican calendar of Greece or Rome. Chaumette at once arranged a meeting with this father, _who had reached so high a level_, as they said in those days. During the interview Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was taken into a closet where she found two women who were instructed to satisfy themselves as to her sex, and she showed them her breast. They then escorted her to the great Salle des Declarations, and there, after a metaphorical allocution, Chaumette baptized her _Sempronie_; a name which habit was destined to fasten upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil and which she never abandoned.