cal draperies, severe yet suggestive... she must be rouged
and painted... for she is a mere idol... easily to be appeased with
incense, music and laughter."

He was getting deeply interested in his subject, seeking minutiae of
detail, with which to render his theme more and more attractive.

But patience was never the characteristic of the Revolutionary
Government of France. The National Assembly soon tired of Chaumette's
dithyrambic utterances. Up aloft on the Mountain, Danton was yawning
like a gigantic leopard.

Soon Henriot was on his feet. He had a far finer scheme than that of
the Procureur to place before his colleagues. A grand National fete,
semi-religious in character, but of the new religion which destroyed and
desecrated and never knelt in worship.

Citizen Chaumette's Goddess of Reason by all means--Henriot conceded
that the idea was a good one--but the goddess merely as a figure-head:
around her a procession of unfrocked and apostate priests, typifying
the destruction of ancient hierarchy, mules carrying loads of sacred
vessels, the spoils of ten thousand churches of France, and ballet girls
in bacchanalian robes, dancing the Carmagnole around the new deity.

Public Prosecutor Foucquier Tinville thought all these schemes very
tame. Why should the People of France be led to think that the era of
a new religion would mean an era of milk and water, of pageants and of
fireworks? Let every man, woman, and child know that this was an era of
blood and again of blood.

"Oh!" he exclaimed in passionate accents, "would that all the traitors
in France had but one head, that it might be cut off with one blow of
the guillotine!"

He approved of the National fete, but he desired an apotheosis of the
guillotine; he undertook to find ten thousand traitors to be beheaded on
one grand and glorious day: ten thousand heads to adorn the Place de
la Revolution on a great, never-to-be-forgotten evening, after the
guillotine had accomplished this record work.

But Collot d'Herbois would also have his say. Collot lately hailed from
the South, with a reputation for ferocity unparalleled throughout the
whole of this horrible decade. He would not be outdone by Tinville's
bloodthirsty schemes.

He was the inventor of the "Noyades," which had been so successful at
Lyons and Marseilles. "Why not give the inhabitants of Paris one of
these exhilarating spectacles?" he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh.

Then he explained his i