"Citizen Merlin!" he said quietly, as he recognised the foremost among them.
"Himself, Citizen-Deputy," rejoined the latter, with a sneer, "at your service."
Anne Mie, in a remote corner of the hall, had heard the name, and felt her very soul sicken at its sound.
Merlin! Author of that infamous Law of the Suspect which had set man against man, a father against his son, brother against brother, and friend against friend, had made of every human creature a bloodhound on the track of his fellow-men, dogging in order not to be dogged, denouncing, spying, hounding, in order not to be denounced.
And he, Merlin, gloried in this, the most fiendishly evil law ever perpetrated for the degradation of the human race.
There is that sketch of him in the Musée Carnavalet, drawn just before he, in his turn, went to expiate his crimes on that very guillotine, which he had sharpened and wielded so powerfully against his fellows. The artist has well caught the slouchy, slovenly look of his loosely knit figure, his long limbs and narrow head, with the snakelike eyes and slightly receding chin. Like Marat, his model and prototype, Merlin affected dirty, ragged clothes. The real Sans-cullottism, the downward levelling of his fellow-men to the lowest rung of the social ladder,
