f
Robespierre's correspondents, advises him of 6,000.[4124]--The statement
of these murders is not complete, but 17,000 have been enumerated,[4125]
"most of them effected without any formality, evidence or direct
charge," among others the murder of "more than 1200 women, several of
whom were octogenarians and infirm;"[4126] particularly the murder of 60
women or young girls, condemned to death, say the warrants, for having
attended the services of unsworn priests, or for having neglected the
services of a sworn priest.

"The accused, ranged in order, were condemned at sight. Hundreds of
death-sentences took about a minute per head. Children of seven, five
and four years of age, were tried. A father was condemned for the son,
and the son for the father. A dog was sentenced to death. A parrot was
brought forward as a witness. Numbers of accused persons whose sentences
could not be written out were executed."

At Angers, the sentences of over four hundred men and three hundred and
sixty women, executed for the purpose of relieving the prisons, were
mentioned on the registers simply by the letters S or G (shot or
guillotined).[4127] At Paris, as in the provinces, the slightest
pretext[4128] served to constitute a crime. The daughter of the
celebrated painter, Joseph Vernet,[4129] was guillotined for being a
" receiver," for having kept fifty pounds of candles in her house,
distributed among the employees of La Muette by the liquidators of the
civil list. Young de Maille,[4130] aged sixteen years, was guillotined
as a conspirator, "for having thrown a rotten herring in the face of
his jailer, who had served it to him to eat." Madame de Puy-Verin was
guillotined as "guilty" because she had not taken away from her deaf,
blind and senile husband a bag of card-counters, marked with the royal
effigy.--In default of any pretext,[4131] there was the supposition of a
conspiracy; blank lists were given to paid emissaries, who undertook
to search the various prisons and select the requisite number of heads;
they wrote names down on them according to their fancy, and these
provided the batches for the guillotine.

"As for myself," said the juryman Vilate, "I am never embarrassed. I am
always convinced. In a revolution, all who appear before this tribunal
ought to be condemned."--

At Marseilles, the Brutus Commission,[4132] "sentencing without public
prosecutor or jurymen, sent to the prisons for those it wished to put
to death. A