# Ninety-three/2.2.1

BOOK SECOND.
THE PUBLIC HOUSE OF RUE DU PAON.
CHAPTER I.
MINOS, ÆACUS, AND RHADAMANTHUS.
In Rue du Paon there was a public house, called a café. This café had a back room, which is now historical. It was there that men, so powerful and so closely watched that they hesitated to speak to one another in public, occasionally met almost secretly. It was there, on the twenty-third of October, 1792, that the famous kiss was exchanged between la Montague and la Gironde. Although he does not admit it in his " Mémoires," it was there that Garat came for information that gloomy night, when he stopped his carriage on the Port-Royal, to listen to the tocsin, after he had put Clavière in a place of safety in Rue de Beaune.
On the twenty-eighth of June, 1793, three men were gathered around a table in this back room. Their chairs did not touch; they were seated on different sides of the table, leaving the fourth vacant. It was about eight o'clock in the evening; it was still light in the street, but dark in the back room, and a hanging lamp, then a luxury, lighted the table.
The first of these three men was pale, young, solemn, with thin lips, and a cold face. He had a nervous twitching in his cheek, which must have hindered him from smiling. He was powdered and gloved, there was not a wrinkle in his light blue coat, well brushed and buttoned up. He wore nankeen breeches, white stockings, a high cravat a plaited shirt frill, shoes with silver buckles.
The two other men were one, a sort of giant, the other ​a sort of dwarf. The tall man was carelessly dressed in a loose coat of scarlet cloth, his neck bare in a necktie unfastened and falling below his shirt frill, his vest open for lack of buttons; he wore top-boots; his hair was in disorder, though it showed traces of having been dressed, and there was horse-hair in his wig. His face was pitted with smallpox, he had an angry frown between his eyelids, a kindly pucker in the corners of his mouth, thick lips, large teeth, a porter's hand, flashing eyes. The small man was yellow, and looked deformed when he was seated; he carried his head thrown back, his eyes were bloodshot, there were livid spots on his face; he wore a handkerchief tied over his smooth, greasy hair; he had no forehead, and a terrible, enormous mouth. He wore long pantaloons, slippers, a waistcoat which seemed to have been white satin once, and over this waistcoat, a loose jacket, in the folds of which a hard straight line betrayed a dagger.
The first of these men was called Robespierre; the second, Danton; the third, Marat.
They were alone in this room. In front of Danton stood a glass and a wine-bottle covered with dust, suggesting Luther's beer-glass; in front of Marat, a cup of coffee; in front of Robespierre, papers.
Near the papers was seen one of those heavy leaden inkstands, round and ridged, which will be remembered by those who were schoolboys in the beginning of this century. A pen was thrown down beside the inkstand. On the papers was placed a large copper seal bearing the words, "Palloy fecit," and which formed an exact miniature model of the Bastille.
A map of France was spread out in the centre of the table.
Outside the door was stationed Marat's watch-dog, that Laurent Basse, porter at number 18 Rue des Cordeliers, who, the thirteenth of July, or about two weeks after this twenty-eighth of June, was to strike the head of a woman named Charlotte Corday, with a chair; she was at this time in Caen, dreaming vague dreams. Laurent Basse was the printer's devil of the Ami du Peuple. This evening he had been brought by his master to the café in Rue du Paon, and ordered to keep the room closed where Marat, Danton, and Robespierre were, and not to let ​ anybody enter unless it were some one from the Committee, of Public Safety, from the Commune, or the Évêché.
Robespierre did not wish to close the door against Saint-Just, Danton did not wish to close it against Pache, Marat did not wish to close it against Gusman.
The conference had already lasted a long time. Its subject was the pile of papers on the table which Robespierre had been reading. The voices began to grow higher. Something like anger was brewing between these three men. Outside, loud words were occasionally heard from within. At this period the custom of public tribunals seemed to have created the right to listen. It was the time when Fabricius Pâris, the copying clerk looked through the key-hole to see what the Committee of Public Safety was doing. Which, by the way, was not in vain, for it was Pâris who warned Danton the night of the thirtieth of March, 1794. Laurent Basse had put his ear to the door of the back room where Danton, Marat, and Robespierre were. Laurent Basse served Marat, but he belonged to the Évêché.