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That Monsieur de Batz was certainly not lacking in effrontery his carriage showed. He came in with a swagger.

Although he had arrived in Hamm within the hour, he displayed no stains of travel. A person of neat, tidy habits, he had carefully restored himself to order at the inn. He wore an apricot velvet coat and black satin smalls, stockings of black silk and red-heeled shoes with silver buckles. He carried a three-cornered hat adorned by a white cockade. His brown hair was carefully clubbed.

He came forward briskly, his keen, lively eyes throwing passing glances of recognition at the attendant gentlemen. He halted, waited a moment for the Regent to extend his hand, but he was nowise abashed when this did not happen. He bowed, his face set in lines of utmost gravity, and waited as the etiquette prescribed for his Highness to address him.

The Regent, half-twisted in his chair, considered him without friendliness.

'So you have returned, Monsieur de Batz. We were not expecting you.' He paused, and added coldly: 'We are not pleased with you, Monsieur de Batz.'

'Faith, I'm not pleased with myself,' said the Baron, whom nothing could put out of countenance.

'We wonder that you should have troubled to return.'

'I come to render my accounts, Monseigneur.'

'They are rendered. The events have rendered them. They have very fully reported your failure.'

The Gascon knit his brows. 'With submission, Monseigneur, I cannot control Fate. I cannot say to Destiny: "Halte-là! It is de Batz who passes."'

'Ah! You lay the blame on Destiny? She is the scapegoat of every incompetent.'

'I am not of those, Monseigneur. If I were not extremely competent, I should not be here. By now I should have put my head through the little window of the guillotine, in Paris.'

'Your failure leaves you unabashed, sir.'

'Failure must be measured by the attempt. I attempted a miracle with no more than ordinary human powers.'

'You were very confident of being able to perform it when you induced us to entrust you with the task.'

'Will your Highness suffer a question? Was there, amongst all the twenty thousand French exiles who followed you at the time, any other who begged to be entrusted with it?'

'Another might have been found. I should have sought him, no doubt, but for your overweening confidence in your own powers to save the King.'

Still de Batz kept his countenance in the face of this monstrous obstinacy in ingratitude. But he could not quite exclude asperity from his reply.

'Your Highness would have sought him had it occurred to you that such an attempt was possible. It does not follow that your Highness would have found him. But it does follow that had you found him, he must have failed.'

'Must have failed? And why, if you please?'

'Because I failed. And where I failed, I'll take leave to inform your Highness that no man could have succeeded.'

In the group by the table behind him someone laughed. De Batz quivered as if he had been struck. But it was scarcely perceptible, and beyond this he gave no sign. Monsieur was regarding him in cold incredulity.

'Still, and in spite of all, the boastful Gascon!'

This was too much even for de Batz's self-control. He permitted his tone to express an infinite bitterness. 'Your Highness is pleased to rebuke me.'

His Highness was annoyed by the imputation of injustice. 'Have you not deserved it, monsieur? Did you not win our trust by your emphatic assertions, your boastful promises? Did you not pledge me your word that you would bring the King safely out of Paris if I would entrust you with the means? I gave liberally, all that you demanded, out of a treasury from which we could ill spare the gold; gold which today might be used to nourish French gentlemen who are starving in exile. What have you done with this gold?'

The Baron audibly caught his breath. His intrepid countenance had turned pale under its healthy tan. 'I can assure your Highness that I have not used a louis of it to my own advantage.'

'I do not ask you what you have not done with it. But what you have done.'

'Your Highness requires accounts of me?'

'Is not that the purpose of your return? To render your accounts?'

The Baron shifted his position, so that by a half-turn of his head he could survey every man in the room. His glittering eyes looked at the pallid d'Avaray, still leaning on the window-sill. The favourite's face was a mask. The Gascon's glance travelled on. Flachslanden and Plougastel were rigidly glum. Kercadiou showed a countenance of gentle sympathy. D'Entragues was sneering, and de Batz remembered how from the outset d'Entragues—jealous of any secret-agent work of which he was not himself the instigator and guide—had opposed the undertaking, had stigmatized it as crack-brained and impossible, and had argued against the supply of means for it.

At the end of that moment's utter silence, the Baron spoke very quietly.

'I have kept no accounts in detail. I had not thought that it would be required of me. I am not a trader to keep ledgers, Monseigneur; and this is not an affair of trade. But from memory, I will do my best to prepare a statement. Meanwhile, I can assure you, Monseigneur, that the sums expended amount to more than twice those which I had from your Highness.'

'What do you tell me, sir? Is this another Gasconnade? Whence could you have procured the money?'

'If I say that I procured it, it must follow that I did. For although a Gascon, I have found no one yet of a temerity to doubt my honour or to assume that I might soil myself by falsehood. I spent the gold in corrupting some of the easily corruptible canaille that has charge of the administration in France today. Every man who could be of service to me, who could assist me in my design, I bribed to neglect his duty.

'For the rest, Monseigneur, my failure is to be attributed to two factors which I did not take into account when I entered upon this difficult and hazardous undertaking. The first of these is the fact that the King was already a closely guarded prisoner when I reached Paris. I arrived some few days too late for the plan which I had in mind. And for that delay, if you will do me the justice, Monseigneur, to carry your mind back to Coblentz, when first I laid my plans before you, the blame attaches to Monsieur d'Entragues.'

D'Entragues started in surprise to exclaim angrily:

'To me, sir? To me?'

'To you, sir,' snapped de Batz, glad at last to fasten his teeth in someone who was not shielded by rank. 'Had you not contemned my design, argued against it with his Highness, described it as a reckless gamble of means that could not be spared, I should have started three weeks earlier. I should have been in Paris while the King was still at large in the Luxembourg, a full fortnight before he was conveyed a prisoner to the Temple; and my task would have been easy.'

'We have your word for that,' said d'Entragues, with a curling lip and a sidelong glance at Monsieur.

'You have, and you will be wise not to doubt it,' said the Baron sharply, so sharply that the Regent rapped the table to remind them of his presence and the deference due to him.

'The second cause of your failure, Monsieur de Batz?' he asked, to keep him to the point.

'This lay in a danger of which I was always aware, but the risk of which I must accept. Finding my original intentions frustrated by his Majesty's captivity, I was under the necessity of formulating another plan of campaign. A choice of alternatives presented itself. Rightly or wrongly, I decided that an eleventh-hour rescue was the one that offered the best chances. I am still persuaded that I made a wise choice and that but for betrayal I should have succeeded. The organization of this attempt called for infinite labour, infinite caution, infinite patience. All these I was able to supply. I got together a little band of royalists, entrusting to each of them the enlisting of others. Soon we were five hundred strong, and in constant touch with one another. These five hundred I instructed, equipped, and armed there in Paris under the nose of the Convention and its Office of Surveillance. I spent money freely to accomplish it. When it was clear that his Majesty would be brought to trial and that the sentence was foregone, I completed my plan of action. It was plain to all that, whilst the more abandoned of the rabble would look with satisfaction upon the execution of the King, the main body of the people would regard it with fear and horror. This main body was dominated by the noisy aggressiveness of a minority; but a bold call at the right moment would arouse it from its paralysis. There is a glamour about the person of a consecrated King. He is less a human being than a symbol, the incarnation of an idea; and to all men of any imagination or sensibility there is a repugnance to see violence done to him. I founded my hopes upon this. I would post my five hundred at a convenient point, which the King must pass on his way to execution. When he reached it, I would give the signal. My five hundred would raise the cry of "Live the King!" and hurl themselves upon the guards.'

He paused for a moment. The seven men in the room, caught in the spell of his exposition, seemed scarcely to breathe. All eyes were upon him.

'Can your Highness doubt—can anyone doubt—what must have followed? My five hundred would have supplied the nucleus for a massed rising to rescue his Majesty. They would have supplied the cutting edge to an axe that would have derived its weight of metal from those who would instantly have flocked to join them. The paralysis of the majority would have been broken.' He sighed. 'Hélas! Could any of you have been there, as I was, at the appointed place, at the corner of the Rue de la Lune, under the bastion of the Bonne Nouvelle, could you have seen, as I saw, the awe in the ranks of those who waited to see the royal carriage pass on its way to the Place de la Révolution, as they now call the Place Louis XV, could you have observed the scared silence of those thousands, you would not have doubted what must follow upon my rallying cry and the dash of my five hundred.

'Standing there, waiting in the crowd, I was not only confident of success for the immediate design, but I had more than a hope to start a conflagration in which the revolution would have been consumed. Given such a rallying-point as we should have provided for the thousands who mistrust the new régime and view with horror the spread of anarchy and confusion, but who stand spell-bound for lack of resolute leadership, we might have brought about such a rising as would have carried the King back to his throne and swept away forever the Convention and its supporting rabble.'

He paused again, and smiled wryly upon their intentness.

'But I was Gasconnading, as you would say, Monseigneur. Of what use to continue? I failed. Let that alone be remembered. The intelligence to plot, the skill to combine, the energy and courage that were ready to execute, of what account are these when the goal is missed? When the narrow line that sometimes lies between success and failure has not been crossed?'

His sarcasm stung them. Yet his Highness overlooked it in the breathless interest de Batz had aroused.

'But how came you to fail? How?'

A shadow crossed the Baron's face. 'I have already told you. The plan was betrayed by one of those—I know not which—in whom I was compelled to trust.'

'That was inevitable with so many in the secret,' rasped d'Entragues. 'It should have been foreseen.'

'It was foreseen. I am not quite a fool, Monsieur d'Entragues. But to foresee is not always to be able to forestall. A man caught in a burning house will foresee that if he jumps from a window he may break his neck. But that should not prevent him from jumping, since if he remains he will be burned alive. I perceived the risk, and I did what was humanly possible to guard against it. I had no choice but to accept it. There was no other way.'

'What happened, then?' his Highness demanded. 'You have not told us that.'

'The details?' De Batz shrugged again. 'Oh, if they interest you, Monseigneur ...' And he resumed: 'I repeat that Paris as a body did not desire the death of the King; that the Parisians were appalled, awe-stricken in the face of a deed which savoured of sacrilege, and from which they instinctively feared terrible consequences to themselves. As I have said, no man who saw the crowd in the streets on that January morning could have a doubt on this. And the Convention was aware of it, the Committees of the Sections were aware of it. From the Temple to the Place de la Révolution, a double file of soldiers held the route in which all traffic was that day forbidden. The King had for escort not merely a mounted regiment of National Gendarmerie, and a regiment of grenadiers of the National Guard, but a battery of cannon that rolled thundering through the streets immediately ahead of the royal carriage. This was densely surrounded by guards. Its closed windows were smeared with lather, so that not so much as a glimpse of the royal countenance should act as an incitement to the spirit which the authorities knew to be abroad. The tramp of marching feet, the rumble and rattle of the gun-carriages, and the rolling of the drums were the only sounds. A silence such as that in which those thousands stood to see his Majesty pass to execution must have been witnessed to be credited, must have been experienced to realize its impressiveness, its unnatural, uncanny solemnity.

'I dwell on this, Monseigneur, to show you how far I was from any miscalculation of the public spirit upon which I was depending. The authorities were aware that their own existence was at stake that day.' He raised his voice with sudden vehemence. 'I do not hesitate to assert that their gamble in sending the King to execution was infinitely more desperate than mine in conceiving the attempt to rescue him.'

He flung down that sentence like a gauntlet, and paused a moment to see if any would take it up, his eyes challenging in particular Monsieur d'Entragues. Then, returning to his earlier, rather wistful, tone, he resumed his narrative.

'Before seven o'clock that morning I was at the point I had chosen for the attempt, at the corner of the Rue de la Lune. I climbed to the top of the bastion and waited. Time passed. The crowd behind the military files increased in density and stood silent in the chill of awe which went deeper than the chill of that misty winter's morning. I scanned the throng for my five hundred, in ever-increasing anxiety. I could discover none of them. At last, when already in the distance we could make out the approaching roll of the drums, I was joined on my eminence by two of my followers, the Marquis de la Guiche and Devaux. They shared my despair when I was unable to explain the absence of the others.

'Afterwards, when all was over, I discovered that in the night the Committee of Surveillance, furnished, no doubt, by our betrayer, with a list of the names and addresses of my five hundred, had taken its measures. Two gendarmes had waited upon each of my royalists. They were placed under temporary arrest in their own lodgings, until noon, until it should be too late for any attempt to thwart the intentions of the Convention. No further measures were taken against them. Five hundred men are not to be indicted upon the word of a single traitor, and there was no evidence against them otherwise. We had been too cautious. Also perhaps the moment was not one for proceedings against men who had sought to avert a deed by which the Nation was temporarily appalled.

'That is all my tale. When the royal carriage was abreast of me, I lost my head. It does not often happen, Gascon though I may be. I leapt down from the bastion. Devaux and La Guiche followed me. I attempted to break through the crowd. I waved my hat. I raised a shout. Even then I hoped against hope that we three could accomplish the task alone and give a lead that would be followed. I raised a cry of "Save the King!" Perhaps the thunder of the drums drowned my feeble voice for all except those immediately about me. These shrank from me in dread. Yet it is significant, Monseigneur, it shows yet again how well-judged were the assumptions upon which I acted, that no attempt was made to seize me. I departed unhindered with the only two of my band who like myself had not spent the night at their usual lodging.

'That, Monseigneur, is the full account of the failure of that Gasconnade of mine. As for the moneys that I have spent ...'

'Leave that,' the Regent peevishly interrupted him. 'Leave that.' He sat there, his heavy body sagging limply, his double chin sunk to his breast, vacant-eyed, lost in thought. The narrative had shamed him for his cavalier reception of the intrepid Baron, and it had shamed those others with him. Even d'Entragues, that hostile critic, stood silent and abashed.

But in vain persons shame is an emotion commonly with reactions of resentment against those who have provoked it. Presently, while de Batz waited, his Highness rallied. He sat up, threw back his head, wrapped himself in a mantle of dignity, and delivered himself with pompous formality.

'We are grateful to you, Monsieur de Batz, for these explanations, no less than for your activities, which we regret, with you, should not have been attended by the success they appear to have deserved. At the moment that would seem to be all, unless ...' He looked questioningly from d'Avaray to d'Entragues.

Answering that glance, Monsieur d'Avaray silently shook his head, made a faint gesture of protest with one of his delicate almost translucent hands. D'Entragues bowed stiffly.

'I have no comments, Monseigneur, for Monsieur de Batz.'

The Baron looked at them with frank incredulity. They had no comments!

'I realize, of course,' he said, and so level was his tone that they could only suspect his irony, 'that what I have done deserves no commendation. Judgment must always be upon results.' And then, in a vindictive desire to heap coals of fire upon their heads—heads which he began to account ignoble and contemptible—he went on smoothly: 'But my task in the service of the monarchy is far from ended. My little army of loyal men is still on foot. I should not have quitted France but that I accounted it my duty to make a full report to your Highness in person. Having made it, I crave your Highness's leave to return, and such commands as you may have for me.'

'You propose to return? To Paris?'

'I have said, Monseigneur, that I would not have left but for the duty to report to you.'

'And what do you hope to do there now?'

'Perhaps—unless I have entirely forfeited your confidence—your Highness will instruct me in your wishes.'

The Regent was at fault. He turned to d'Entragues for assistance. D'Entragues was equally destitute of ideas and said so in many words.

'We will consider, Monsieur de Batz,' the Regent informed him. 'We will consider, and inform you. We need not detain you longer at the moment.'

With condescension, as if to temper the chill of that dismissal, Monsieur held out his plump white hand. The Baron took it, bowed very low over it, and bore it to lips that were faintly twisted in a smile.

Then he straightened himself, turned sharply on his red heels, and, ignoring the others, marched stiffly out of that cedar-panelled, low-ceilinged, uncarpeted audience-chamber.