excitement had roused
the demon in the human heart. Life was a plaything, murder a pastime.
Torches were lighted, refreshments introduced, songs of mirth and
joviality rose upon the night air, and still the horrid carnage
continued unabated. Now and then, from caprice, one was liberated; but
the innocent and the guilty fell alike. Suspicion was crime. An
illustrious name was guilt. There was no time for defense. A frown
from the judge was followed by a blow from the assassin. A similar
scene was transpiring in all the prisons of Paris. Carts were
continually arriving to remove the dead bodies, which accumulated much
faster than they could be borne away. The court-yards became wet and
slippery with blood. Straw was brought in and strewn thickly over the
stones, and benches were placed against the walls to accommodate those
women who wished to gaze upon the butchery. The benches were
immediately filled with females, exulting in the death of all whom
they deemed tainted with aristocracy, and rejoicing to see the exalted
and the refined falling beneath the clubs of the ragged and the
degraded. The murderers made use of the bodies of the dead for seats,
upon which they drank their brandy mingled with gunpowder, and smoked
their pipes. In the nine prisons of Paris these horrors continued
unabated till they were emptied of their victims. Men most illustrious
in philanthropy, rank, and virtue, were brained with clubs by
overgrown boys, who accompanied their blows with fiendish laughter.
Ladies of the highest accomplishments, of exalted beauty and of
spotless purity, were hacked in pieces by the lowest wretches who had
crawled from the dens of pollution, and their dismembered limbs were
borne on the points of pikes in derision through the streets of the
metropolis. Children, even, were involved in this blind slaughter.
They were called the cubs of aristocracy.

We can not enter more minutely into the details of these sickening
scenes, for the soul turns from them weary of life; and yet thus far
we must go, for it is important that all eyes should read this
dreadful yet instructive lesson--that all may _know_ that there is no
despotism so dreadful as the despotism of anarchy--that there are no
laws more to be abhorred than the absence of all law.

In the prison of the Bicetre there were three thousand five hundred
captives. The ruffians forced the gates, drove in the dungeon doors
with cannon, and for five days and five nights