When they saw the draw-bridge down and their fellow insurgents swarming over the prison, a yell of triumph rent the smoky air and, rushing forward, they met Louison Brisot surrounded by a mob of blackened ruffians, who bore the keeper Doudel’s head upon a pike. Through all the fiendish noise that followed this horrible encounter, one shrill cry pierced like an arrow, and a little old woman, who had anxiously followed the fiendish gang rather than join it, fell lifeless on the pavement. It was Dame Doudel, the murdered man’s widow. “Take her up and carry her home,” cried Louison Brisot. “One man is not much to give to France, besides, her’s was a traitor.” For one dread moment there was silence in the crowd. Those women were not all fiends, and Dame Doudel was popular among them. Deep and bitter murmurs rose up against Louison. The crowd was ready to turn and rend her where she stood. The woman, who was audacious, but hardly brave, saw her danger and trembled; but a flash of courage saved her. “Behold, there stands the prisoner Gosner. Women of France, it was I that set him free. Let us bear him home in triumph.” Murmurs of rage were now turned to a wild shout of approval. Those mad women swarmed around the prisoner and his family. They recognized Madame Gosner, and smothered her with hot kisses from lips that tasted of gunpowder. They lifted that poor old man to the cannon brought for another purpose, and prepared to drag him through the streets of Paris as a proof of their victory. Madame Gosner clung to her husband till fragments of his tattered garments were torn off and left in her hand. “Mount, mount!” cried the women, poising her upon the cannon, where she threw both arms around her husband and kept him from falling. Louison Brisot snatched a red cap from the head of an insurgent, and throwing it over the white locks of the prisoner, flung herself across one end of the gun, astride, as if she had been mounting a war charger. “On, on!” she shouted, tearing the flame-colored scarf from her shoulders, and streaming it through the circling smoke. “Let the people of Paris see how the king deals with them!” A hundred hands, grim with dust, blackened with powder, quivering and eager as the claws of hungry vultures, seized upon the rope and hurled the cannon forward. The crowd was torn apart, or trampled down. Thunders of applause followed this army of women, which was engulfed in the black masses of the streets, as a stormy ocean swallows up the ships tossing on its waves. Marguerite Gosner saw both father and mother thus forcibly swept away without the power to speak, and found herself quite alone with Monsieur Jacques and St. Just. “Oh, take me home,” she pleaded, reaching forth her arms to the younger man, “it is terrible, I shall die!” St. Just gathered her close to his side, forgetful of the other presence, and bent his face to hers. “Have no fear, my beloved. Am I not with you!”