characters of the period; and in my assumed inviolability, I used to
exhibit the uncouth gestures and spluttering utterance of Marat--the
wild and terrible ravings of Danton--and even the reedy treble of my own
patron, Robespierre, as he screamed denunciations against the enemies of
the people. It is true these exhibitions of mine were only given in
secret to certain parties, who, by a kind of instinct, I felt could be
trusted.

Such was my life, as one day, returning from the Convention, I beheld a
man affixing to a wall a great placard, to which the passing crowd
seemed to pay deep attention. It was a decree of the Committee of Public
Safety, containing the names of above seven hundred royalists, who were
condemned to death, and who were to be executed in three "tournees," on
three successive days.

For some time back the mob had not been gratified with a spectacle of
this nature. In the ribald language of the day, the "holy guillotine had
grown thirsty from long drought;" and they read the announcement with
greedy eyes, commenting as they went upon those whose names were
familiar to them. There were many of noble birth among the proscribed,
but by far the greater number were priests, the whole sum of whose
offending seemed written in the simple and touching words, "_ancien
cure_," of such a parish! It was strange to mark the bitterness of
invective with which the people loaded these poor and innocent men, as
though they were the source of all their misfortunes. The lazy indolence
with which they reproached them, seemed ten times more offensive in
their eyes than the lives of ease and affluence led by the nobility. The
fact was, they could not forgive men of their own rank and condition
what they pardoned in the well-born and the noble! an inconsistency that
has characterized democracy in other situations besides this.

As I ran my eyes down the list of those confined in the Temple, I came
to a name which smote my heart with a pang of ingratitude as well as
sorrow--the "Pere Michel Delannois, soi disant cure de St. Blois"--my
poor friend and protector was there among the doomed! If up to that
moment, I had made no effort to see him, I must own the reason lay in my
own selfish feeling of shame--the dread that he should mark the change
that had taken place in me--a change that I felt extended to all about
me, and showed itself in my manner, as it influenced my every action. It
was not alone that I lost the obedient