"At that cry De Mauleon rushed forward, arrested his soldiers, cried,
'This man is innocent--a harmless physician. I answer for him.' As he
thus spoke, a wounded Communist, lying in the gutter amidst a heap of the
slain, dragged himself up, reeled towards De Mauleon, plunged a knife
between his shoulders, and dropped down dead.

"The Vicomte was carried into a neighbouring house, from all the windows
of which the tricolour was suspended; and the Medecin whom he had just
saved from summary execution examined and dressed his wound. The Vicomte
lingered for more than an hour, but expired in the effort to utter some
words, the sense of which those about him endeavoured in vain to seize.

"It was from the Medecin that the name of the assassin and the motive for
the crime were ascertained. The _miscreant_ was a Red Republican and
Socialist named Armand Monnier. He had been a very skilful workman, and
earning, as such, high wages. But he thought fit to become an active
revolutionary politician, first led into schemes for upsetting the world
by the existing laws of marriage, which had inflicted on him one woman
who ran away from him, but being still legally his wife, forbade him to
marry another woman with whom he lived, and to whom he seems to have been
passionately attached.

"These schemes, however, he did not put into any positive practice till
he fell in with a certain Jean Lebeau, who exercised great influence over
him, and by whom he was admitted into one of the secret revolutionary
societies which had for their object the overthrow of the Empire. After
that time his head became turned. The fall of the Empire put an end to
the society he had joined: Lebeau dissolved it. During the siege Monnier
was a sort of leader among the _ouvriers_; but as it advanced and famine
commenced, he contracted the habit of intoxication. His children died of