Baroness Emmuska Orczy

The Elusive Pimpernel Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Book Excerpt:0 ...mbly of the Convention and seriously discussed the means of providing her with both these things which she asked for. Chaumette, I think it was, who first solved the difficulty: --Procureur Chaumette, head of the Paris Municipality, he who had ordered that the cart which bore the dethroned queen to the squalid prison of the Conciergerie should be led slowly past her own late palace of the Tuileries, and should be stopped there just long enough for her to see and to feel in one grand mental vision all that she had been when she dwelt there, and all that she now was by the will of the People. Chaumette, as you see, was refined, artistic;--the torture of the fallen Queen's heart meant more to him than a blow of the guillotine on her neck. No wonder, therefore, that it was Procureur Chaumette who first discovered exactly what type of new religion Paris wanted just now."Let us have a Goddess of Reason," he said, "typified if you will by the most beautiful woman in Paris. Let us have a f...