sassins (the exact number is known). People trembled. At the
Assembly the old moderate party had disappeared. There were not more
than two hundred odd deputies present at the shameful and powerless
sessions. Terrorized Paris was in a state of stupor and prostration.

The murderers ended by execrating themselves. Tormented by remorse,
they could see nothing before them but vivid faces, reeking entrails,
bleeding limbs. "Among the cut-throats," M. Louis Blanc has said,
"some gave signs of insanity that led to the supposition that some
mysterious and terrible drug had been mingled with the wine they
drank." Some of them became furious madmen. Others sought refuge in
suicide, killing themselves the moment they had no one else to kill.
Others enlisted. They were chased out of the army. Among these was
the man who had carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe on a pike.
One day when he was boasting of his murders, the soldiers became
indignant and {371} put him to death. Others still were tried as
Septembrists and sent to the scaffold. The guilty received their
punishment, even on this earth. Well! there are people nowadays who
would like to rehabilitate them! In vain has Lamartine, the founder of
the Second Republic, exclaimed in a burst of noble wrath: "Has human
speech an execration, an anathema, which is equal to the horror these
crimes of cannibals inspire in me, as in all civilized men?" In vain
have the most celebrated historians of democracy, Edgar Quinet and
Michelet, expressed in eloquent terms their indignation against these
crimes. In vain has M. Louis Blanc said: "Every murder is a suicide.
In the victim the body alone is killed; but what is killed in the
murderer is the soul." There are men who would not alone excuse, but
glorify the assassinations and the assassins!

[1] M. Mortimer-Ternaux, _Histoire de la Terreur_.

[2] Claude Fournier-Lheritier, was born in Auvergne, 1745, and served
as a volunteer in Santo Domingo, 1772-85, with Toussaint l'Ouverture,
whence his sobriquet "the American."

{372}

XXXVI.

MADAME ROLAND DURING THE MASSACRES.

Madame Roland's hatred was appeased. The ambitious _bourgeoise_
throned it for the second time at the Ministry of the Interior, and the
Queen groaned in captivity in the Temple tower. The Egeria of the
Girondins had not felt her heart swell with a single movement of pity
for Marie Antoinette. The fatal 10th of August had seemed to