Well might Marguerite Gosner cry to her God for help; for with the force of a whirlwind she was swept back toward the draw-bridge and in danger of being trampled to death. Her plaintive cry for the mother she had lost, was answered by a rude hand which grasped her by the shoulder. “Ha! I have reached you at last,” hissed the fierce voice of a woman in her ear. “Citizens, here is the daughter of old Doudel, who has been twenty years torturing prisoners in this accursed pile. Which of you want a dainty morsel for his hatchet? Take her while I pick off the old fox. I see him on the ramparts now.” With a powerful swing of her arms, Louison Brisot hurled the helpless creature back upon a group of young men who followed her like a pack of fiends, shrieking and howling as they went. As she fell at their feet, the woman who had flung her there, snatched a musket from the nearest insurgent, and leveled it at Doudel, who was steadily pacing the ramparts up and down, as if no work of death were going on beneath him. “Oh, my God, spare him, spare him,” cried Marguerite, struggling against the rude hands that had lifted her from the earth. A young man heard her cry, and knew the voice. With the bound of a panther, he sprang upon Louison Brisot and dashed down the musket, with which she was coolly taking aim. Then he turned, and tore Marguerite from the ruffians that held her. “Are you men, or brutes?” he thundered, dashing the foremost back with his disengaged hand. “When women turn fiends, can Frenchmen be found to do their evil work.” The sharp crack of a rifle mingled with these indignant words. Down from the nearest tower a human form plunged headlong, and fell in an awful heap at Louison’s feet. The woman coolly returned the musket that had done this fearful work, and strode up to the young man who had so bravely attempted to prevent it. “The women of France can do their own work, Monsieur St. Just, and by the looks of that white face, I should say that my shot had killed two birds.” St. Just looked down upon the deathly face on his bosom and, in his terror at its whiteness, forgot the fiendish laugh of the woman whom he believed to have killed an innocent girl. Gathering the lifeless form in his arms, he carried it across the thronged draw-bridge, and finding an empty bench in the Cour de Gouvernment, laid her upon it. There seemed no hope of getting restoratives in that fearful place, which was still crowded with the mob, and dark with rolling smoke. But as St. Just laid his burden down, a man came reeling up from the cellars of the governor’s dwelling, which the fire had not reached, carrying a bottle of wine in his hand, which he flung about ferociously. St. Just caught this man by the arm. “Citoyen, give me some of the wine, here is a poor girl dying for want of it.” “Is she one of us?” answered the man. “Yes, yes.” The ruffian glanced at Marguerite’s humble garments, and was satisfied.