rove,
palliate, or keep silent; nobody dares offer resistance.[31130] Property
as well as lives belong to whoever wants to take them. At the barriers,
at the markets, on the boulevard of the Temple, thieves, decked with
the tricolor ribbon, stop people as they pass along, seize whatever they
carry, and, under the pretext that jewels should be deposited on the
altars of Patriotism, take purses, watches, rings, and other articles,
so rudely that women who are not quick enough, have the lobes of their
ears torn in unhooking their earrings[31131]. Others, installed in the
cellars of the Tuileries, sell the nation's wine and oil for their own
profit. Others, again, given their liberty eight days before by
the people, scent out a bigger job by finding their way into
the Garde-meuble and stealing diamonds to the value of thirty
millions.[31132]

Like a man struck on the head with a mallet, Paris, felled to the
ground, lets things go; the authors of the massacre have fully attained
their ends. The faction has fast hold of power, and will maintain its
hold. Neither in the Legislative Assembly nor in the Convention will the
aims of the Girondins be successful against its tenacious usurpation.
It has proved by a striking example that it is capable of anything,
and boasts of it; it is still armed, it stands there ever prepared and
anonymous on its murderous basis, with its speedy modes of operation,
its own group of fanatical agents and bravos, with Maillard and
Fournier, with its cannon and its pikes. All that does not live within
it lives only through its favor from day to day, through its good will.
Everybody knows that. The Assembly no longer thinks of dislodging people
who meet decrees of expulsion with massacre; it is no longer a question
of auditing their accounts, or of keeping them within the confines
of the law. Their dictatorship is not to be disputed, and their
purification continue. From four to five hundred new prisoners, arrested
within eleven days, by order of the municipality, by the sections,
and by this or that individual Jacobin, are crowded into cells still
dripping with blood, and the report is spread that, on the 20th of
September, the prisons will be emptied by a second massacre.[31133]--Let
the Convention, if it pleases, pompously install itself as sovereign,
and grind out decrees--it makes no difference; regular or irregular,
the government still marches on in the hands of those who hold the
sword.[31134]