six o'clock
A good number owed their lives to that mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel , that unknown Englishman who had snatched scores of victims from the clutches of Tinville the Prosecutor , and sent M. Chauvelin , baffled , back to France . Aristocrats were getting scarce , so it was now the turn of deputies of the National Convention , of men of letters , men of science or of art , men who had sent others to the guillotine a twelvemonth ago , and men who had been loudest in defence of anarchy and its Reign of Terror . They had revolutionised the Calendar : the Citizen-Deputies , and every good citizen of France , called this 19th day of August 1793 the 2nd Fructidor of the year I. of the New Era . At six o'clock on that afternoon a young girl suddenly turned the angle of the Rue Ecole de Médecine , and after looking quickly to the right and left she began deliberately walking along the narrow street . It was crowded just then . Groups of excited women stood jabbering before every doorway . It was the home-coming hour after the usual spectacle on the Place de la Révolution .