Paul Marat. He told me that he had taken my child away from me, not from
any idea of revenge for my disdain in the past, but from a spirit of
pure patriotism. My boy, he said, should not be brought up with the same
ideas of bourgeois effeteness and love of luxury which had disgraced
the nation for centuries. No! he should be reared amongst men who had
realised the true value of fraternity and equality and the ideal of
complete liberty for the individual to lead his own life, unfettered by
senseless prejudices of education and refinement. Which means, Monsieur,"
the poor woman went on with passionate misery, "that my child is to be
reared up in the company of all that is most vile and most degraded in
the disease-haunted slums of indigent Paris; that, with the connivance
of that execrable fiend Marat, my only son will, mayhap, come back to me
one day a potential thief, a criminal probably, a drink-sodden reprobate
at best. Such things are done every day in this glorious Revolution of
ours--done in the sacred name of France and of Liberty. And the moral
murder of my child is to be my punishment for daring to turn a deaf ear
to the indign passion of a brute!"

Once more she paused, and when the melancholy echo of her broken voice
had died away in the narrow room, not another murmur broke the stillness
of this far-away corner of the great city.

The man did not move. He stood looking down upon the poor woman before
him, a world of pity expressed in his deep-set eyes. Through the
absolute silence around there came the sound as of a gentle flutter, the
current of cold air, mayhap, sighing through the ill-fitting shutters, or
the soft, weird soughing made by unseen things. The man's heart was full
of pity, and it seemed as if the Angel of Compassion had come at his
bidding and enfolded the sorrowing woman with his wings.