ot going to be sent off to the
frontier. Their post is at the capital; they have sworn "to defend
liberty"; neither before nor after September make them deviate from this
end. When, after having drawn money on every treasury and under
every pretext, they at last consent to leave Paris, it is only on the
condition that they return to Marseilles. Their operations are limited
to the interior of France, and only against political adversaries. But
their zeal in this field is only the greater; it is their band which,
first of all, takes the twenty-four priests from the town hall, and, on
the way, begins the massacre with their own hands.[3182]

Then there are the "enrages" of the Paris proletariat, a few of
them clerks or shopkeepers, most of them artisans of all the trades;
locksmiths, masons, butchers, wheelwrights, tailors, shoemakers,
waggoners, especially dockers working in the harbor, market-porters,
and, above all, journeymen and apprentices of all kinds, in short,
manual workers on the bottom of the social ladder.[3183] Among these
we find beasts of prey, murderers by instinct, or simple robbers.[3184]
Others who, like one of the disciples of Abbe Sicard, whom he loves
and venerates, confess that they never stirred except under
constraint.[3185] Others are simple machines, who let themselves be
driven: for instance the local forwarding agent, a good sort of man, but
who, dragged along, plied with liquor, and then made crazy, kills twenty
priests for his share, and dies at the end of the month, still
drinking, unable to sleep, frothing at the mouth and trembling in every
limb.[3186] And finally the few, who, with good intentions, are carried
away by the bloody whirlwind, and, struck by the grace of Revolution,
become converted to the religion of murder. One of them a certain
Grapin, deputized by his section to save two prisoners, seats himself
alongside of Maillard, sits in judgment at his side during sixty-three
hours, and demands a certificate from him.[3187] The majority, however,
entertain the same opinions as the cook, who, after taking the Bastille,
finding himself on the spot and having cut off M. de Launay's head,
regards it as a "patriotic" action, and deems himself worthy of a "medal
for having destroyed a monster." These people are not common criminals,
but well-disposed persons living in the vicinity, who, seeing a public
service established in their neighborhood,[3188] issue from their homes
to give a hand