or sack chateaux, and,
if a mayor happens to inform them that the chateau now belongs to the
nation and not to an emigre; they reply with "thrusts," and threaten to
cut his throat.[3250] As the 10th of August draws near, the phantom
of authority, which still occasionally imposed on them, completely
vanishes, and "they risk nothing in killing" whoever displeases
them.[3251] Exasperated by the perils they are about to encounter on
the frontier, they begin war in the interior. Provisionally, and as a
precaution, they slaughter probable aristocrats on the way, and treat
the officers, nobles and priests they meet on the road worse than their
club allies. For, on the one hand, being merely on the march, they are
much safer from punishment than local murderers; in a week, lost in
the army, they will not be sought for in camp, and they may slay
with perfect security. On the other hand, as they are strangers and
newcomers, they are not able, like local persons, to identify a person.
So on account of a name, a dress, qualifications, a coffee-house rumor,
or an appearance, however venerable and harmless a man may be, they kill
him, not because they know him, but because they do not know him.

VI.--A tour of France in the cabinet of the Minister of the Interior.

From Carcassonne to Bordeaux.--Bordeaux to Caen.--The north
and the east.--Chalons-sur-Marne to Lyons.--The Comtat and
Provence.--The tone and the responses of the Jacobin
administration.--The programme of the party.

Let us enter the cabinet of Roland, Minister of the Interior, a
fortnight after the opening of the Convention, and suppose him
contemplating, some evening, in miniature, a picture of the state of the
country administered by him. His clerks have placed the correspondence
of the past few weeks on his table, arranged in proper order; his
replies are noted in brief on the margin; he has a map of France before
him, and, placing his finger on the southern section, he moves it along
the great highway across the country. At every stage he recurs to the
paper file of letters, and passing innumerable reports of violence, he
merely gives his attention to the great revolutionary exploits.[3252]
Madame Roland, I imagine, works with her husband, and the couple,
sitting together alone under the lamp, ponder over the doings of the
ferocious brute which they have set free in the provinces the same as in
Paris.

Their eyes go first to the southern