e _belle Liegeoise_, called
also la belle Theroigne de Mericourt, and the _premiere amazone de la
Liberte_. From the garden of the Tuileries, the usual scene of her
orations, she one day ascended to the terrace of the Feuillants, where
she fell into the hands of the women of the party of the Montagne, who
surrounded her, trussed up her petticoats, and gave her a public
whipping. The "first amazon of Liberty" screamed, shrieked, but no one
came to her rescue, and when her persecutors finally released her, it
was found that she had lost her reason, and it was necessary to
conduct her to an insane asylum in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.

[Illustration: A CONCIERGE. From a drawing by Ludovico Marchetti.]

All the chronicles of the times devote a paragraph to the "Furies of the
Guillotine," the terrible women who habitually occupied the front places
among the spectators at all the executions, and who interrupted their
knitting only to hurl insults at the victims who mounted the scaffold.
These _tricoteuses_ affected an exalted Revolutionary sentiment, they
wore the red cap of liberty, and one day presented themselves at the
Convention with an address in which they offered to mount guard while
the men went off to combat in the armies on the frontier.

At the great gate of the Tuileries, between the two marble horses of
Coustou, was a cafe-restaurant, painted a lively red, and which bore the
sign: "_A la Guillotine._" "Needless to say, that the establishment was
always full of customers." During the two years in which the instrument
of public executions stood permanently on the Place de la Revolution, on
the site of the present obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, so much
blood was shed there that, it is said, a herd of cattle refused to cross
the Seine on the bridge, terrified at the stale odor of slaughter. By
the side of the scaffold was a hole destined to receive the blood of the
victims, but this diffused such an infection through the air that "the
citizen Coffinet thought it would be advantageous to establish, on a
little two-wheeled barrow, a casket lined with lead to receive the
blood, which might then be transported to the _fosse commune_."

On the 16th of September, 1797, the Central Bureau, "justly indignant at
the debauchery and at the offences constantly committed against the
public morality, whether by the impudent exhibition of books and
pictures the most obscene, or by the prodigious multiplicity of women
and