“I have told you his name; he is called Thomas Millière. Question whom you please, colonel, and throughout all Vendée and Brittany you’ll hear but one voice on that man. From the day of the rising in Vendée and Brittany, now six years ago, Millière has been, always and everywhere, the most active agent of the Terror. For him the Terror did not end with Robespierre. He denounced to his superiors, or caused to be denounced to himself, the Breton and Vendéan soldiers, their parents, friends, brothers, sisters, wives, even the wounded and dying; he shot or guillotined them all without a trial. At Daumeray, for instance, he left a trail of blood behind him which is not yet, can never be, effaced. More than eighty of the inhabitants were slaughtered before his eyes. Sons were killed in the arms of their mothers, who vainly stretched those bloody arms to Heaven imploring vengeance. The successive pacifications of Brittany and Vendée have never slaked the thirst for murder which burns his entrails. He is the same in 1800 that he was in 1793. Well, this man--” Roland looked at the general. “This man,” continued the general, with the utmost calmness, “is to die. Seeing that society did not condemn him, I have condemned him.” “What! Die at La Roche-Bernard, in the midst of the Republicans; in spite of his bodyguard of assassins and executioners?” “His hour has struck; he is to die.” Cadoudal pronounced these words with such solemnity that no doubt remained in Roland’s mind, not only as to the sentence, but also the execution of it. He was thoughtful for an instant. “And you believe that you have, the right to judge and condemn that man, guilty as he is?” “Yes; for that man has judged and condemned, not the guilty but the innocent.” “If I said to you: ‘On my return to Paris I will demand the arrest and trial of that man,’ would you not trust my word?” “I would trust your word; but I should say to you: ‘A maddened wild beast escapes from its cage, a murderer from his prison; men are men, subject to error. They have sometimes condemned the innocent, they might spare the guilty.’ My justice is more certain than yours, colonel, for it is the justice of God. The man will die.” “And by what right do you claim that your justice, the justice of a man liable to error like other men, is the justice of God?” “Because I have made God a sharer in that justice. Oh! my condemnation of that man is not of yesterday.” “How do you mean?”