He was strolling with Vergniaud, again in the Thuilleries gardens. It was a day of lazy sunshine, and the walks and grass-plots were crowded. Paris must laugh and breathe, though in the committee rooms yonder the whirring machinery of election to the new National Convention was shaking the whole town; though forty-seven out of the forty-eight sections, with their tag-rag and bob-tail, were howling for the king’s abdication through all the courts of the city; though the shadow of the Brunswicker and his emigrants was already projecting itself, like a devil’s search-light, from a contracting horizon; though hate, and terror, and fanaticism were crouching in every corner with smouldering linstocks in their hands. The babble was not less, or less animated, for this. Children sailed their boats on the ponds, or played ball about the grass. It was a scene of light and good-humour. Against the terrace of the Feuillans, to the north of the gardens, the strollers came upon the first sign of a serpent in this Eden--a long, broad, tricolour ribbon stretched from tree to tree, and bearing the inscription, “_Tyran, notre colère tient à un ruban; ta couronne tient à un fil_.” “It shall be excused, or blamed, for its wit,” said Vergniaud, and as he spoke there came uproar from a distance, where some victim to mob-resentment was being trailed through a horsepond. A cloud shut out the sun. The two men, fallen suddenly moody, made their way to a gate that led from the gardens into the Rue du Dauphin, that was a tributary of the Rue St Honoré. Vergniaud glanced up at the name of the former. “_Tient à un fil_,” he murmured, and shook his head, with a sigh. On the moment of their emerging into the greater thoroughfare, a discordant rabble came upon them--a mouthing, sweltering throng of patriots, with a woman at their head banging a drum. “_Voilà la prêtresse habituée_, Théroigne de Méricourt!” said Vergniaud, with a soft chuckle.