he bludgeons which mangled their flesh and
crushed their bones; while women looked on in calm delight, lifting high
the children, who clapped their hands for joy. Old men who ought to have
been preparing for a Christian death helped, by their goading cries, to
render the death of these wretched beings more wretched still. And in
the midst of these old men, a little septuagenarian, dainty, powdered,
flicking his lace shirt frill if a speck of dust settled there, pinching
his Spanish tobacco from a golden snuff-box, with a diamond monogram,
eating his "amber sugarplums" from a Sevres bonbonniere, given him
by Madame du Barry, and adorned with the donor's portrait--this
septuagenarian--conceive the picture, my dear Sir John--dancing with his
pumps upon that mattress of human flesh, wearying his arm, enfeebled
by age, in striking repeatedly with his gold-headed cane those of the
bodies who seemed not dead enough to him, not properly mangled in that
cursed mortar! Faugh! My friend, I have seen Montebello, I have seen
Arcole, I have seen Rivoli, I have seen the Pyramids, and I believe I
could see nothing more terrible. Well, my mother's mere recital, last
night, after you had retired, of what has happened here, made my hair
stand on end. Faith! that explains my poor sister's spasms just as my
aneurism explains mine."

Sir John watched Roland, and listened with that strange wonderment
which his young friend's misanthropical outbursts always aroused. Roland
seemed to lurk in the niches of a conversation in order to fall upon
mankind whenever he found an opportunity. Perceiving the impression he
had made on Sir John's mind, he changed his tone, substituting bitter
raillery for his philanthropic wrath.

"It is true," said he, "that, apart from this excellent aristocrat who
finished what the butchers had begun, and dyed in blood the red heels
of his pumps, the people who performed these massacres belonged to the
lower classes, bourgeois and clowns, as our ancestors called those who
supported them. The nobles manage things much more daintily. For the
rest, you saw yourself what happened at Avignon. If you had been told
that, you would never have believed it, would you? Those gentlemen
pillagers of stage coaches pique themselves on their great delicacy.
They have two faces, not counting their mask. Sometimes they are
Cartouche and Mandrin, sometimes Amadis and Galahad. They tell fabulous
tales of these heroes of the highways. My mo