Now, in the thick of the events that followed fast and irresistible upon the heels of an overture to what was, in truth, a disguised anarchy, he could not but feel himself something renewing that state of mind, curious and fiercely pitiful, that had been induced in him years before by his contemplation of the first scenes of a tragedy that was now labouring in its penultimate act. And here the emotion of the moment seemed always significant of the trend of the plot, until--puff! the dramatic weathercock would go round, and the wind of applause blow from another quarter, freezing or wet according to a rule that was just the regular absence of any. But the food of excited conjecture never failed to save his heart from feeding upon its own tissues, and was the sustenance to his starving hopes. Indeed, at this last, it seldom occurred to him, a temporary sojourner in the city of doom, that he was other than an unalienable minute condition of the city’s life; and he would no more than his friend Pierre-Victorin desire to repudiate his liabilities thereto. The 10th of August had passed like a death-cloud--“a ragged bastion fringed with fire”--sweeping the streets with a storm of blood. The king, dethroned, was a prisoner in the Temple; the mob occupied itself in the violent erasing of all symbols of royalty. Vergniaud and the Gironde were in perilous, protesting power; the prisons were glutting; the guillotine had begun to rise and fall like a force-pump, draining the human marshes. Of Théroigne, the militant priestess of St Antoine, Ned heard only, vaguely rumoured, that--sated, perhaps, with her share in the events of the Thuilleries massacre--she was inclining to the moderate policy of Brissot and his following, and was temporarily, at least, withdrawn from the influence of her earlier colleagues. That she was moved to this course by any self-loathing for the deed of which he had been witness he, detesting her, would not believe. But he had no wish to entertain one further thought of her in his mind. So the month sped by--its every succeeding hour fresh fuel to the popular wrath and terror over the rumoured advance of the Allies upon the city,--and on the last day of it a strange little rencontre took place between two of the minor actors in a very extraneous branch of the general tragedy.