support without which the massacres could hardly have been carried
out. After the first day they diminished rapidly; and by the end of the
third day all popular support was gone, and a feeling of horror had
seized on the city and supplanted everything else. Then again the mob,
as it crowded about the {153} prison doors, showed a marked attitude.
Many of the prisoners, those who were so lucky as to pass for good
citizens and friends of the people, were released. As these came out the
crowd received them with every sign of joy and of fraternization. When
on the contrary it was a victim coming out to be slaughtered, there was
silence, no shouting, no exultation.

In other words, the event was, with most, an act of popular justice, and
this was the appearance it had even when seen from the interior of the
prisons. At l'Abbaye Maillard presided over the self-appointed tribunal,
and it is impossible to doubt that, whenever he was satisfied that the
prisoner deserved his freedom, he attempted to secure his life. The case
of St. Meard, an aristocrat, a colonel, who had enough good sense and
courage to speak plainly to the judges, avowing himself a royalist but
persuading them that he took no part in anti-revolutionary schemes, is
most illuminating. Maillard declared he saw no harm in him; he was
acquitted; and was fraternally embraced by the crowd when he safely
passed the fatal door.

All did not have the good fortune of St. Meard. The case of the
Princesse de {154} Lamballe, at La Force, must serve to give the worst
side of, and to close, this chapter of blood. Long the friend,
confidante and agent of the Queen, she had followed her to the Temple,
and had been removed from there but a few days previously. She was too
well known and too near Marie Antoinette to have any chance of escape.
In a fainting condition she was dragged before the tribunal, and was soon
passed out to the executioners. It is not probable that she had much
consciousness of what followed. The gang of murderers at this point were
butchers of the Halles, and they apparently treated their victim as they
might have a beast brought to the slaughter. She was carried under the
arms to where a pile of bodies had accumulated, and, in a moment made
ready, was butchered in the technical sense of the term. Her head was
hoisted on a pike, as also other parts of her dismembered anatomy, and
carried in triumph to be displayed under the windows of the prison