ureau "to denounce aristocrats"; on the way
they continue to strike the tottering old man, who falls down; they
then decapitate him, place pieces of his body on pikes, and parade these
about. Meanwhile, in this same town, twenty-two gentlemen; at Beaune,
forty priests and nobles; at Dijon, eighty-three heads of families,
locked up as suspected without evidence or examination, and confined at
their own expense two months under pikes, ask themselves every morning
whether the populace and the volunteers, who shout death cries through
the streets, mean to release them in the same way as in Paris.[3284]--A
trifle is sufficient to provoke a murder. On the 19th of August, at
Auxerre as the National Guard is marching along, three citizens, after
having taken the civic oath, "left the ranks," and, on being called
back, "to make them fall in," one, either impatient or in ill-humor,
"replied with an indecent gesture". The populace, taking it as an
insult, instantly rush at them, and shoving aside the municipal body and
the National Guards, wound one and kill the other two.[3285] A fortnight
after, in the same town, several young ecclesiastics are massacred,
and "the corpse of one of them remains three days on a manure heap,
the relatives not being allowed to bury it." About the same date, in
a village of sabot makers, five leagues from Autun, four ecclesiastics
provided with passports, among them a bishop and his two
grand-vicars, are arrested, then examined, robbed, and murdered by
the peasantry.--Below Autun, especially in the district of Roanne, the
villagers burn the rent-rolls of national property; the volunteers put
property-owners to ransom; both, apart from each other or together, give
themselves up "to every excess and to every sort of iniquity against
those whom they suspect of incivism under pretense of religious
opinions."[3286] However preoccupied or upset Roland's mind may be
by the philosophic generalities with which it is filled, he has long
inspected manufactures in this country; the name of every place is
familiar to him; objects and forms are this time clearly defined to his
arid imagination, and he begins to see things through and beyond mere
words.

Madame Roland rests her finger on Lyons, so familiar to her two years
before; she becomes excited against "the quadruple aristocracy of the
town, petty nobles, priests, heavy merchants, and limbs of the law; in
short, those formerly known as honest folks, according