II
Thus Theresia had attained one of her great desires: the Scarlet Pimpernel was as good as captured, and when he finally succumbed he could not fail to know whence came the blow that struck him.
With regard to her future, matters were more doubtful. She had not yet subjugated Robespierre sufficiently to cause him to give up his more humble love and to lay down his power and popularity at her feet; whilst the man who had offered her his hand and name—citizen Tallien—was forever putting a check upon her ambition and his own advancement by his pusillanimity and lack of enterprise.
Whilst she was aching to push him into decisive action, into seizing the supreme power before Robespierre and his friends had irrevocably established theirs, Tallien was for temporising, fear that in trying to snatch a dictatorship he and his beloved with him would lose their heads.
“While Robespierre lives,” Theresia would argue passionately, “no man’s head is safe. Every rival, sooner or later, becomes a victim. St. Just and Couthon aim at a dictatorship for him. Sooner or later they will succeed; then death to every man who has ever dared oppose them.”
“Therefore ’tis wiser not to oppose,” the prudent Tallien would retort. “The time will come—”
“Never!” she riposted hotly. “While you plot, and argue and ponder, Robespierre acts or signs your death-warrant.”
“Robespierre is the idol of the people; he sways the Convention with a word. His eloquence would drag an army of enemies to the guillotine!”
“Robespierre!” Theresia retorted with sublime contempt. “Ah, when you have said that, you think you have said everything! France, humanity, the people, sovereign power!—all that, you assert, is embodied in that one man. But, my friend, listen to me!” she went on earnestly. “Listen, when I assert that Robespierre is only a name, a fetish, a manikin set up on a pedestal! By whom? By you, and the Convention; by the Clubs and the Committees. And the pedestal is composed of that elusive entity which you call the people and which will disintegrate from beneath his feet as soon as the people have realised that those feet are less than clay. One touch of a firm finger against that manikin, I tell you, and he will fall as dust before you; and you can rise upon that same elusive pedestal—popularity, to the heights which he hath so easily attained.”
But, though Tallien was at times carried away by her vehemence, he would always shake his head and counsel prudence, and assure her that the time was not yet. Theresia, impatient and dictatorial, had more than once hinted at rupture.
“I could not love a weakling,” she would aver; and at the back of her mind there would rise schemes, which aimed at transferring her favours to the other man, who she felt would be more worthy of her.
“Robespierre would not fail me, as this coward does!” she mused, even while Tallien, blind and obedient, was bidding her farewell at the very door of the charlatan to whom Theresia had turned in her ambition and her difficulties.