CHAPTER XXVII
THE FRUCTIDOR RIOTS
Many accounts, more or less authentic, have been published of the events known to history as the "Fructidor Riots."
But this is how it all happened: at anyrate it is the version related some few days later in England to the Prince of Wales by no less a personage than Sir Percy Blakeney; and who indeed should know better than The Scarlet Pimpernel himself?
Déroulède and Juliette Marny were the last of the batch of prisoners who were tried on that memorable day of Fructidor.
There had been such a number of these, that all the covered carts in use for the conveyance of prisoners to and from the Hall of Justice had already been despatched with their weighty human load; thus it was that only a rough wooden cart, hoodless and rickety, was available, and into this Déroulède and Juliette were ordered to mount.
It was now close on nine o'clock in the evening. The streets of Paris, sparsely illuminated here and there with solitary oil lamps
