particularly pointed out to the fury of the mob, was
dragged violently from his residence, and along the pavement to the
altar of the Cordeliers, where he was murdered by sabre-strokes and
blows from bludgeons, trampled under foot, his dead body outraged and
cast as an expiatory victim at the feet of the offended statue. The
national guard, having despatched a detachment with two pieces of cannon
from the fort, drove back the infuriated populace, and picked from the
pavement the naked and lifeless carcase of Lescuyer. The prisons of the
city had been broken open, and the miscreants they contained came to
offer their assistance for other murders. Horrible reprisals were
feared, and yet the mediators, absent from the city, were asleep, or
closed their eyes upon the actual danger. The understanding between the
leaders of the Paris clubs and the rioters of Avignon became more
fearfully intimate.

VII.

One of those sinister persons who seem to smell blood and presage crime,
reached Avignon from Versailles: his name was Jourdan. He is not to be
confounded with another revolutionist of the same name, born at Avignon.
Sprung from the arid and calcined mountains of the south, where the very
brutes are more ferocious; by turns butcher, farrier, and smuggler, in
the gorges which separate Savoy from France; a soldier, deserter,
horse-jobber, and then a keeper of a low wine shop in the suburbs of
Paris; he had wallowed in all the lowest vices of the dregs of a
metropolis. The first murders committed by the people in the streets of
Paris had disclosed his real character. It was not that of contest but
of murder. He appeared after the carnage to mangle the victims, and
render the assassination fouler. He was a butcher of men, and he boasted
of it. It was he who had thrust his hands into the open breasts and
plucked forth the hearts of Foulon and Berthier.[14] It was he who had
cut off the head of the two _gardes-du-corps_, de Varicourt and des
Huttes, at Versailles, on the 6th of October. It was he who, entering
Paris, bearing the two heads at the end of a pike, reproached the people
with being content with so little, and having made him go so far to cut
off only two heads! He hoped for better things at Avignon, and went
thither.

There was at Avignon a body of volunteers called the army of Vaucluse,
formed of the dregs of that country, and commanded by one Patrix. This
Patrix having been assassinated by his troop, whose excess