and slight, was dressed in well-made cloth clothes; his hair was held in
at the nape of the next in a modish manner with a black taffeta bow. His
hands were clean, slender, and claw-like, and he wore the tricolour
scarf of office round his waist which proclaimed him to be a member of
one of the numerous Committees which tyrannised over the people.

The papers appeared to be in order, and proclaimed the bearer to be Paul
Mole, a native of Besancon, a carpenter by trade. The identity book had
recently been signed by Jean Paul Marat, the man's latest employer, and
been counter-signed by the Commissary of the section.

The man in the tricolour scarf turned with some acerbity on the crowd
who was still pressing round the prisoner.

"Which of you here," he queried roughly, "levelled an unjust accusation
against an honest citizen?"

But, as usual in such cases, no one replied directly to the charge. It
was not safe these days to come into conflict with men like Mole. The
Committees were all on their side, against the bourgeois as well as
against the aristos. This was the reign of the proletariat, and the
sans-culotte always emerged triumphant in a conflict against the well-
to-do. Nor was it good to rouse the ire of citizen Chauvelin, one of the
most powerful, as he was the most pitiless, members of the Committee of
Public Safety. Quiet, sarcastic rather than aggressive, something of the
aristo, too, in his clean linen and well-cut clothes, he had not even
yielded to the defunct Marat in cruelty and relentless persecution of
aristocrats.

Evidently his sympathies now were all with Mole, the out-at-elbows,