lf with plunder.--Out of eighteen members, simultaneously
or in succession, of the "Bonnet Rouge," fourteen, before the 10th
of August and especially since the 2nd of June, are unknown in this
quarter, and had taken no part in the Revolution. The most prominent
among these are three painters, heraldic, carriage and miniature,
evidently ruined and idle on account of the Revolution, a candle-dealer,
a vinegar-dealer, a manufacturer of saltpeter, and a locksmith; while of
these seven personages, four have additionally enhanced the dignity
of their calling by vending tickets for small lotteries, acting as
pawnbrokers or as keepers of a biribi[3352] saloon. Seated along with
these are two upper-class domestics, a hack-driver, an ex-gendarme
dismissed from the corps, a cobbler on the street corner, a runner on
errands who was once a carter's boy, and another who, two months before
this, was a scavenger's apprentice, the latter penniless and in tatters
before he became one of the Committee, and since that, well clad, lodged
and furnished. Finally, a former dealer in lottery-tickets, himself a
counterfeiter by his own admission, and a jail-bird. Four others have
been dismissed from their places for dishonesty or swindling, three are
known drunkards, two are not even Frenchmen, while the ring-leader,
the man of brains of this select company is, as usual, a seedy, used-up
lawyer, the ex-notary Pigeot, and expelled from his professional body
on account of bankruptcy. He is probably the author of the following
speculation: After the month of September, 1793, the Committee, freely
arresting whomsoever it pleased in the quarter, and even outside of it,
makes a haul of "three hundred heads of families" in four months, with
whom it fills the old barracks it occupies in the rue de Sevres. In
this confined and unhealthy tenement, more than one hundred and twenty
prisoners are huddled together, sometimes ten in one room, two in the
same bed, and, for their keeping, they pay three hundred francs a day.
As sixty-two francs of this charge are verified, there is of this sum,
(not counting other extortions or concessions which are not official),
two hundred and thirty-eight francs profit daily for these 'honest'
contractors. Accordingly, they live freely and have "the most
magnificent dinners" in their assembly chamber; the contribution of ten
or twelve francs apiece is "nothing" for them.--But, in this opulent St.
Germain quarter, so many rich