nais and Beaujolais, without
counting those of Alsace. On the 31st of July, Lally-Tollendal, on
entering the tribune, has his hands full of letters of distress, with
a list of thirty-six chateaux burnt, demolished, or pillaged, in one
province, and the details of still worse violence against persons:[1345]

"in Languedoc, M. de Barras, cut to pieces in the presence of his
wife who is about to be confined, and who is dead in consequence; in
Normandy, a paralytic gentleman left on a burning pile and taken off
from it with his hands burnt; in Franche-Comte, Madame de Bathilly
compelled, with an ax over her head, to give up her title-deeds and even
her estate; Madame de Listenay forced to do the same, with a pitchfork
at her neck and her two daughters in a swoon at her feet; Comte de
Montjustin, with his wife, having a pistol at his throat for three
hours; and both dragged from their carriage to be thrown into a pond,
where they are saved by a passing regiment of soldiers; Baron de
Montjustin, one of the twenty-two popular noblemen, suspended for an
hour in a well, listening to a discussion whether he shall be dropped
down or whether he should die in some other way; the Chevalier d'Ambly,
torn from his chateau and dragged naked into the village, placed on a
dung-heap after having his eyebrows and all his hair pulled out, while
the crowd kept on dancing around him."

In the midst of a disintegrated society, under the semblance only of a
government, it is manifest that an invasion is under way, an invasion
of barbarians which will complete by terror that which it has begun by
violence, and which, like the invasions of the Normans in the tenth and
eleventh centuries, ends in the conquest and dispossession of an entire
class. In vain the National Guard and the other troops that remain loyal
succeed in stemming the first torrent; in vain does the Assembly hollow
out a bed for it and strive to bank it in by fixed boundaries. The
decrees of the 4th of August and the regulations which follow are but so
many spiders' webs stretched across a torrent. The peasants, moreover,
putting their own interpretation on the decrees, convert the new laws
into authority for continuing in their course or beginning over again.
No more rents, however legitimate, however legal!

"Yesterday,"[1346] writes a gentleman of Auvergne, we were notified
that the fruit-tithe (percieres) would no longer be paid, and that the
example of other provinces was on