disappear from the surface of the
globe."[34121] Certain leaders desired to entrust the purification of
Paris to the sagacity of popular instinct. "In loose and disconnected
phrases" they address the people: "Rouse yourselves, and act according
to your inclinations, as my indications might only startle those you
should strike down and thereby allow them to escape!" Varlet proposes,
on the contrary, a plan of public safety, very full and explicit, in
fifteen articles:

"Sweep away the deputies of the 'Plain,' and other deputies of
the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, all nobles, priests,
pettifoggers, etc.; exterminate the whole of that race, and the
Bourbons, too, with entire suppression of the Ministers."

Hebert, for his part, alluding to the Girondists, writes in his gazette
that "the last hour of their death is going to strike," and that, "when
their foul blood shall have been spilled, aristocratic brawlers will
return to their holes, the same as on the 10th of August. "Naturally,
the professional slaughterers are notified. A certain Laforet, an
old-clothes dealer on the Quai-du-Louvre, who, with his wife, had
already distinguished themselves on the 2nd of September, reckons that
"there are in Paris 6,000 sans-culottes ready to massacre at the
first sign all dangerous deputies, and eight thousand petitioners,"
undoubtedly those who, in the several sections, signed the addresses
to the Convention against the Commune.--Another "Septemberizer,"[34122]
commanding the battalion of the Jardin des Plantes, Henriot, on meeting
a gang of men working on the wharves, exclaims in his rough voice:

"Good morning, my good fellows, we shall need you soon, and at better
work. You won't have wood to carry in your carts--you'll have to carry
dead bodies."

"All right," replies one of the hands, half tipsy, "we'll do it as we
did the 2nd of September. We'll turn a penny by it."--

Cheynard, a locksmith and machinist at the mint, is manufacturing
daggers, and the women of the tribunes are already supplied with two
hundred of them."--

Finally, on the 29th of May, Hebert proposes, in the Jacobin
club,[34123] "to pounce down on the Commission of Twelve," and another
Jacobin declares that "those who have usurped dictatorial power,"
meaning by that the Girondists, "are outlawed."

All this is extreme, clumsily done, useless and dangerous, or, at least,
premature, and the chiefs of the "Mountain," Danton, Robespierre, and
Ma