"What say you to beef with mustard?" one of the men quoted while he struggled with a tough piece of boiled pork garnished with haricot beans.
"I like it passing well," his neighbour completed the quotation, "but for the moment I have a fancy for a Lancashire hot-pot, such as my old lady makes at home."
"Well!" broke in a man obviously from the north, "Sunday at my home is the day for haggis, and with a wineglassful of good Scotch whiskey poured over it, I tell you, my friends . . ." He did not complete the sentence, but by way of illustrating his meaning he just smacked his lips, and attacked the tough bit of pork with almost savage vigour.
Two men were sitting together at a table close by. One of the said, speaking in French with a contemptuous shrug:
"These English! Their one subject of conversation is food."
The other, without commenting on this, merely remarked:
"You understand English then, Monsieur le Baron?"
"Yes. Don't you?"
"I never had any lessons," the other replied vaguely.
The two men were a strange contrast, both in appearance and in speech. The one who had been addressed as Monsieur le Baron it was not yet a crime to use a title in Republican France was short and broad-shouldered. He had a florid face, sensual lips and prominent eyes. He spoke French with a hardly perceptible guttural accent, which to a sensitive ear might have betrayed his German or Austrian origin. His manner and way of speaking were abrupt and fussy: his short, fat hands with the spatulated fingers were for ever fidgeting with something, making bread pellets or drumming with obvious nervosity on the table. The other was tall, above the average at any rate in this country: his speech was deliberate, almost pedantic in its purity of expression like a professor delivering a lecture at the Sorbonne: his hands, though slender, betrayed unusual strength. He scarcely ever moved them. Both men were very simply dressed, in black coats and cloth breeches, but while Monsieur le Baron's coat fitted him where it touched, the other's complete suit was nothing short of a masterpiece of the tailor's art.
Just then there rose a general clatter in the room: chairs scraping against tiled floor, calls for hats and coats, comprehensive leave-takings, and more or less noisy exodus through the swing-doors. Robespierre and Desmoulins as they went out passed the time of day with Monsieur le Baron.
"Eh bien, de Batz," Robespierre said to him with a laugh, I have won my bet, haven't I? Louis Capet has got his deserts."
De Batz shrugged his fat shoulders.
"Not yet," he retorted dryly.
When those two had gone, and were immediately followed by Vergniaud and Saint-Just, he who was called de Batz leaned back in his chair and gave a deep sigh of relief.
"Ah!" he said, "the air is purer now that filthy crowd has gone."
"You appeared to be on quite friendly terms with Monsieur Robespierre anyway," the other remarked with a cool smile.
"Appearances are often deceptive, my dear Professor," de Batz retorted.
"Ah?"
"Now take your case. I first met you at a meeting of the Jacobin Club, or was it the Feuillants? I forget which of those pestiferous gatherings you honoured with your presence; but anyway, had I only judged by appearances I would have avoided you like the plague, like I avoid that dirty crowd of assassins. . . ."
"But you were there yourself, Monsieur le Baron," the Professor observed.
"I went out of curiosity, my friend, as you did and as a number of respectable-looking people did also. I sized up those respectable people very quickly. I had no use for them They were just the sort of nincompoops whom Danton's oratory soon turns into potential regicides. But I accosted you that evening because I saw that you were different."
"Why different?"
"Your cultured speech and the cleanliness of your collar."
"You flatter me, sir."
"We talked of many things at first, if you remember. We touched on philosophy and on the poets, on English rhetoric and Italian art: and I went home that night convinced that I had met a kindred spirit, whom I hoped to meet again. When you entered this place an hour ago, and honoured me by allowing me to sit at your table, I felt that Chance had been benign to me."
"Again you flatter me, sir."
The Professor had hardly moved a muscle, while de Batz indulged first in reminiscences and then in flattery. He appeared unconscious of the other's growing excitement, sat leaning back in his chair, one slender hand framed in spotless cambric resting on the table. And all the time his eyes watched under heavy lids the exodus of the various clients of the restaurant, as one by one they finished their dinner, paid their bill, picked up hat and coat and passed out in to the fast gathering gloom. And somehow one felt that nothing escaped those eyes, that they saw everything, and noted everything even though their expression never changed.
The room in the meanwhile had soon become deserted. There remained only de Batz and the Professor at one table, and in the farther corner a group of three men, two of whom were playing dominoes and the third reading a newspaper. De Batz' restless eyes took a quick survey of the room, then he leaned over the table and fixed his gaze on the other's placid face.
"I propose to flatter you still more, my friend," he said, sinking his voice to a whisper. "Nay! I may say to honour you. . . ."
"Indeed?"
"By asking you to help me. . . ."
"To do what?"
"To save the King."
"A heavy task, sir."
"But not impossible. Listen. I have five hundred friends who will be posted to-morrow in different houses along the route between the Temple and the Place de la Révolution. At a signal from me, they will rush the carriage in which only His Majesty and his confessor will be sitting, they will drag the King out of it, and in the mêlée smuggle him into a house close by, all the inhabitants of which are in my pay. You are silent, sir? De Batz went on, his thick, guttural voice hoarse with emotion. "Of what are you thinking?" he added impatiently, seeing that the other remained impassive, almost motionless.
"Of General Santerre," the Professor replied, "and his eighty thousand armed men. Are they also in your pay?"
"Eighty thousand?" de Batz rejoined with a sneer: "Bah!"
"Do you doubt the figure?"
"No! I do not. I know all about Santerre and his eighty thousand armed men, his bristling cannons that are already being set up on the Place de la Révolution, and his cannoneers who will stand by with match burning. But you must take surprise into consideration. The unexpected. The sudden panic. The men off their guard. As a matter of fact, I could tell you of things that occurred before my very eyes when that dare-devil Englishman whom they call the Scarlet Pimpernel snatched condemned prisoners from the very tumbrils that took them to execution. Surely you know about that?"
"I do," the Professor put in quietly, "but I don't suppose that those tumbrils were escorted by eighty thousand armed men. There is such a thing in this world as the impossible, you know, Monsieur le Baron: things that are beyond man's power to effect."
"Then you won't help me?"
"You have not yet told me what you want me to do."