A neat gown, a clean kerchief, were quite an unusual sight down this
way, for Anne Mie seldom went out, and old Madame Deroulede hardly
ever left her room. A good deal of brandy was being drunk at the two
drinking bars, one at each end of the long, narrow street, and by five
o'clock in the afternoon it was undoubtedly best for women to remain
indoors.

The crowd of dishevelled elderly Amazons who stood gossiping at the
street corner could hardly be called women now. A ragged petticoat, a
greasy red kerchief round the head, a tattered, stained shift--to
this pass of squalor and shame had Liberty brought the daughters of
France.

And they jeered at any passer-by less filthy, less degraded than
themselves.

"Ah! voyons l'aristo!" they shouted every time a man in decent
clothes, a woman with tidy cap and apron, passed swiftly down the
street.

And the afternoons were very lively. There was always plenty to see:
first and foremost, the long procession of tumbrils, winding its way
from the prisons to the Place de la Revolution. The forty-four
thousand sections of the Committee of Public Safety sent their quota,
each in their turn, to the guillotine.

At one time these tumbrils contained royal ladies and gentlemen,
_ci-devant_ dukes and princesses, aristocrats from every county in
France, but now this stock was becoming exhausted. The wretched Queen
Marie Antoinette still lingered in the Temple with her son and