ss de Lamballe cooked, and ate it with avidity. "Thus," says M.
de Beauchesne in his excellent work on Louis XVII., "this civilization
which had departed from God, surpassed at a single bound the fury of
savages, and the eighteenth century, so proud of its learning and
humanity, ended by anthropophagy." In the evening, when some one was
giving Collot d'Herbois an account of the day's performances, he
expressed but one regret,--that they had not succeeded in showing Marie
Antoinette the remains of the Princess de Lamballe. "What!" he
spitefully exclaimed, "did they spare the Queen that impression? They
ought to have served up her best friend's head in a covered dish at her
table."

{359}

XXXV.

THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES.

Lovers of paradoxes have tried to represent the September massacres as
something spontaneous, a passing delirium of opinion, a sort of great
national convulsion. This myth was a lie against history and humanity.
It exists no longer, Heaven be thanked. The mists with which it was
sought to shroud these execrable crimes are now dissipated. Light has
been shed upon that series of infernal spectacles which would have made
cannibals blush. No; these odious massacres were not the result of a
popular movement, an unforeseen fanaticism, a paroxysm of rage or
vengeance. They present an ensemble of murders committed in cool
blood, a planned and premeditated thing. M. Mortimer-Ternaux, in his
_Histoire de la Terreur_, M. Granier de Cassagnac, in his _Histoire des
Girondins et des Massacres de Septembre_, have proved this abundantly.
They have exhumed from the archives and the record offices such a mass
of uncontested and incontestable documents, that not the slightest
doubt is now permissible. Edgar Quinet has not hesitated to recognize
this in his book, _La Revolution_. He says: "The {360} massacres were
executed administratively; the same discipline was everywhere displayed
throughout the carnage.... This was not a piece of blind, spontaneous
barbarism; it was a barbarity slowly meditated, minutely elaborated by
a sanguinary mind. Hence it bears no resemblance to anything
previously known in history. Marat harvested in September what he had
been sowing for three years." The Parisian populace, eight hundred
thousand souls, was inert; it was cowardly, it trembled; but it did not
approve, it was not an accomplice. It was a monstrous thing that a
handful of cut-throats should be enough to