onstruct in detail that first of Carrier's drownings on a grand
scale, conceived as an expeditious means of ridding the city of
useless mouths, of easing the straitened circumstances resulting from
misgovernment.

Very soon it was followed by others, and, custom increasing Carrier's
audacity, these drownings--there were in all some twenty-three
noyades--ceased to be conducted in the secrecy of the night, or to be
confined to men. They were made presently to include women--of whom at
one drowning alone, in Novose, three hundred perished under the most
revolting circumstances--and even little children. Carrier himself
admitted that during the three months of his rule some three thousand
victims visited the national bathing-place, whilst other, and no doubt
more veracious, accounts treble that number of those who received the
National Baptism.

Soon these wholesale drownings had become an institution, a sort of
national spectacle that Carrier and his committee felt themselves in
duty bound to provide.

But at length a point was reached beyond which it seemed difficult to
continue them. So expeditious was the measure, that soon the obvious
material was exhausted. The prisons were empty. Yet habits, once
contracted, are not easily relinquished. Carrier would be looking
elsewhere for material, and there was no saying where he might look,
or who would be safe. Soon the committee heard a rumour that the
Representative intended to depose it and to appoint a new one, whereupon
many of its members, who were conscious of lukewarmness, began to grow
uneasy.

Uneasy, too, became the members of the People's Society. They had sent
a deputation to Carrier with suggestions for the better conduct of
the protracted campaign of La Vendee. This was a sore point with the
Representative. He received the patriots with the foulest abuse, and had
them flung downstairs by his secretaries.

Into this atmosphere of general mistrust and apprehension came the most
ridiculous Deus ex machina that ever was in the person of the very young
and very rash Marc Antoine Jullien. His father, the Deputy Jullien,
was an intimate of Robespierre's, by whose influence Marc Antoine was
appointed to the office of Agent of the Committee of Public Safety,
and sent on a tour of inspection to report upon public feeling and the
conduct of the Convention's Representatives.

Arriving in Nantes at the end of January of '94, one of Marc Antoine's
first visits happened