"If it is only a question of the precedence of age, I yield," said his brother. "Oh, and I also! Hi! hi!" cried the Marquis, holding his sides. "By heaven, Marquis, we shall have to toss you out of the window!" impatiently shouted the Count. "Shut your heads, one and all of you," commanded Abbot Morlet. "I shall put the case to you in two words. To-morrow Louis XVI will be conducted from the prison of the Temple to the bar of the Convention. The occasion seems favorable for rescuing the King during the passage. Here is the means proposed. Five or six hundred resolute men, armed under their cloaks with pistols and poniards, will meet at different places previously agreed on, and locate themselves in isolated groups along the route to be taken by the King; they will mingle with the crowd, affect the language of the sans-culottes, and propagate the rumor, designedly launched several days ago, that the majority of the Convention is resolved to spare the life of Capet, and that the people must take justice into its own hands. Our agents will strive thus to inflame the people; during the passage of the King they will cry, 'Death to the tyrant!' At those words, the signal agreed upon, they shall resolutely attack the escort with pistols and daggers. It is our hope that, favored by the tumult, we may be able boldly to seize Louis XVI, and carry him off to some safe retreat prepared in advance. Our men will then march to the Convention and exterminate its members; this being successfully accomplished, proclamations already in print will be placarded over Paris calling all honest men to arms against the Republic. A part of the old elite companies of the National Guard, all the royalists and constitutionalists of Paris, the Emigrants who have been arriving for a fortnight--all will respond to the call to arms, and conduct the King to the Tuileries. Numerous emissaries will be sent at once into the west and south, and to Lyons, all of which places are ready to rise at the voice of the nobles and priests in hiding there. Civil war will flare up at once in several parts of the kingdom. The foreign armies, demoralized by their defeat at Valmy, are now beating an offensive retreat to the frontier; it is hoped that, through the civil war and the consequent chaos, the allies will regain the advantage they had at the opening of the campaign, advance on Paris by forced marches, and inflict terrible chastisement upon it. This culmination, prepared with a long hand--the only way to save the King--was about to occur just before the September massacres. The massacres had their good and their bad side." "You dare to say there was a good side to that carnage? Your language is odious!" interrupted the Bishop.