The business of the Assembly went on—dull routine business, which no one cared about, and was inexpressibly irksome to Mirabeau, whose bold spirit was always restive under delay, even when action might injure himself. Through all these details he could now and then hear the voice and bold, ringing laugh of Louison, bandying jests with his enemies. The sound made him desperate, but, for the first time he felt some respect for the woman who had so adroitly outwitted him—inordinate self-love would not permit him to despise her after this display of her ability. At last a voice was heard asking leave for a privileged question; and Robespierre stood up, speaking in low, hesitating accents, but growing stronger as a dead silence fell upon the Assembly after his first words. Mirabeau turned in his seat, and listened, smiling, while each point of the charges made against him came in terse, bitter words from the man he had, for a long time, despised and ridiculed. How sharply and with what telling simplicity they fell upon his ear. Count Mirabeau, a member of that Assembly, was charged with betraying the people’s trust, inasmuch as he had entered into a secret league with the court to throw the nation back into the power of the nobles. While he professed to seek the liberty of the people, he had all the time been working against their dearest wishes. He was in constant intercourse with the king, and more especially with the Austrian woman, who was known as Queen of France. It would be made clear before the people, that Count Mirabeau had held repeated interviews with the king, and no longer ago than in June, had met the queen privately, in her summer-house at St. Cloud, where he entered into a compact to place the nation in her power. More than this, Mirabeau had, from first to last, been a pensioner of the court, and was in the habit of receiving vast sums of money from the queen, which he expended in such aristocratic and riotous living as no true patriot would indulge in while the people were starving around him. When Robespierre had done reading the carefully prepared charges, Mirabeau leaned back in his chair and said loud enough to be heard by all around him, “Is that all? I thought they would have proven that I was plotting to blow up the Assembly, and undermine all France with a pound of gunpowder. The little viper yonder has not half done his work.”