gs of bright colours. Some young men were dressed in
women's clothes, half torn and soiled with mud. All their countenances,
haggard from debauchery and vice, and furrowed by intoxication, sparkled
with savage delight at the idea that, after a night of filthy orgies,
they should see two women executed on the scaffold prepared for them.

The foul and fetid scum of the population of Paris,--this vast mob--was
formed of thieves and abandoned women, who every day tax crime for their
daily bread, and every evening return to their lairs with their vicious
spoils.[1]

[1] It is calculated that there are in Paris 30,000 persons who
have no other means of existence but theft.

The crowd entirely choked up the means of circulation, and, in spite of
his gigantic strength, the Chourineur was compelled to remain almost
motionless in the midst of this compact throng. He was, however, willing
to remain so, as the prince would not pass the barrier of Charenton
until eleven o'clock, and it was not yet seven; and he had a singular
spectacle before him.

In a large, low apartment, occupied at one end by musicians, surrounded
by benches and tables laden with the fragments of a repast, broken
plates, empty bottles, etc., a dozen men and women, in various disguises
and half drunk, were dancing with the utmost excitement that frantic and
obscene dance called _La Chahut_.

Amongst the dissipated revellers who figured in this saturnalia, the
Chourineur remarked two couples who obtained the most overwhelming
applause, from the revolting grossness of their attitudes, their
gesticulations, and their language. The first couple consisted of a man
disguised as a bear, and nearly covered with a waistcoat and trousers of
black sheepskin. The head of the animal, being too troublesome to carry,
had been replaced by a kind of hood with long hair, which entirely
covered his features; two holes for his eyes, and a long one for his
mouth, allowed him to see, speak, and breathe.

This man--one of the prisoners escaped from La Force (amongst whom were
Barbillon and the two murderers arrested at the ogress's at the
_tapis-franc_, at the beginning of this recital)--this man so masked was
Nicholas Martial, the son and brother of the two women for whom the
scaffold was prepared but a few paces distant.

Induced into this act of atrocious insensibility and infamous audacity
by one of his associates, this wretch had dared with this disguise to
join in th