Page:The Elusive Pimpernel.djvu/9

Rh There must be a new religion : and to attain that there must be a new God.

"Man is a born idol-worshipper."

Very well then! let the People have a new religion and a new God.

Stay! — Not a God this time! for God means Majesty, Power, Kingship! everything in fact which the mighty hand of the people of France has struggled and fought to destroy.

Not a God, but a goddess.

A goddess! an idol! a toy! since even the man-eating tiger must play sometimes.

Paris wanted a new religion, and a new toy, and grave men, ardent patriots, mad enthusiasts, sat in the Assembly of the Convention and seriously discussed the means of providing her with both these things which she asked for.

Chaumette I think it was who first solved the difficulty — Procureur Chaumette, head of the Paris Municipality, he who had ordered that the cart, which bore the dethroned queen to the squalid prison of the Conciergerie, should be led slowly past her own late palace of the Tuileries, and should be stopped there just long enough for her to see and to feel, in one grand mental vision, all that she had been when she dwelt there, and all that she now was by the will of the People.

Chaumette, as you see, was refined, artistic; the torture of the fallen Queen's heart meant more to him than a blow of the guillotine on her neck.

No wonder, therefore, that it was Procureur Chaumette who first discovered exactly what type of new religion Paris wanted just now.

"Let us have a goddess of Reason," he said, "typified if you will by the most beautiful woman in Paris. Let us have a feast of the Goddess of Reason, let there be a pyre of all the gew-gaws which for centuries have been flaunted by overbearing priests before the eyes of starving multitudes, let the people