hem. Through
the stupor spreading over the faces of butchers and cannibals, we see
appearing that of the idiot. It is the revolutionary idiot, in which
all conceptions, save two, have vanished, two fixed, rudimentary, and
mechanical ideas, one destruction and the other that of public safety.
With no others in his empty head, these blend together through an
irresistible attraction, and the effect proceeding from their contact
may be imagined. "Is there anything else to do?" asks one of these
butchers in the deserted court.--"If there is no more to do," reply
a couple of women at the gate, "you will have to think of
something,"[31116] and, naturally, this is done.

As the prisons are to be cleaned out, it is as well to clean them all
out, and do it at once. After the Swiss, priests, the aristocrats, and
the "white-skinned gentlemen," there remain convicts and those confined
through the ordinary channels of justice, robbers, assassins, and those
sentenced to the galleys in the Conciergerie, in the Chatelet, and in
the Tour St. Bernard, with branded women, vagabonds, old beggars, and
boys confined in Bicetre and the Salpetriere. They are good for nothing,
cost something to feed,[31117] and, probably, cherish evil designs. At
the Salpetriere, for example, the wife of Desrues, the poisoner, is,
assuredly, like himself, "cunning, wicked, and capable of anything"; she
must be furious at being in prison; if she could, she would set fire to
Paris; she must have said so; she did say it[31118]--one more sweep of
the broom.--This time, as the job is more foul, the broom is wielded by
fouler hands; among those who seize the handle are the frequenters of
jails. The butchers at the Abbaye prison, especially towards the close,
had already committed thefts;[31119] here, at the Chatelet and the
Conciergerie prisons, they carry away "everything which seems to them
suitable," even to the clothes of the dead, prison sheets and coverlids,
even the small savings of the jailers, and, besides this, they enlist
their cronies. "Out of 36 prisoners set free, many were assassins and
robbers, the killers attached them to their group. There were also 75
women, confined in part for larceny, who promised to faithfully serve
their liberators." Later on, indeed, these are to become, at the
Jacobin and Cordeliers clubs, the tricoteuses (knitters) who fill their
tribunes.[31120]--At the Salpetriere prison, "all the pimps of Paris,
former spies,... libertine