But Deroulede remained unscathed. Even Merlin's law of the suspect
had so far failed to touch him. And when, last July, the murder of
Marat brought an entire holocaust of victims to the guillotine--from
Adam Lux, who would have put up a statue in honour of Charlotte
Corday, with the inscription: "Greater than Brutus", to Charlier, who
would have had her publicly tortured and burned at the stake for her
crime--Deroulede alone said nothing, and was allowed to remain
silent.

The most seething time of that seething revolution. No one knew in
the morning if his head would still be on his own shoulders in the
evening, or if it would be held up by Citizen Samson the headsman, for
the sansculottes of Paris to see.

Yet Deroulede was allowed to go his own way. Marat once said of him:
"Il n'est pas dangereux." The phrase had been taken up. Within the
precincts of the National Convention, Marat was still looked upon as
the great protagonist of Liberty, a martyr to his own convictions
carried to the extreme, to squalor and dirt, to the downward levelling
of man to what is the lowest type in humanity. And his sayings were
still treasured up: even the Girondins did not dare to attack his
memory. Dead Marat was more powerful than his living presentment had
been.

And he had said that Deroulede was not dangerous. Not dangerous to
Republicanism, to liberty, to that downward, levelling process, the
tearing down of old tradidions, and the annihilation of past
pretensions.

Deroulede had once been very rich. He had had sufficient prudence to