The Caledonian

Miscellaneous.

From Lamartine's History of the First French Revolution.

Horrors Enacted at Lyons.

The heads of ten members of the municipality fell next day, and a mine exploding, destroyed some of the finest buildings in the city. A patriotic proclamation, signed by Fouche and Collot, to the clubbists of Lyons and the departments of the Loire and the Rhine, to stimulate their energy, thus summed up their rights and their duties: "Every thing is permissible to those who act in the spirit of the Revolution. The desire of a legitimate vengeance is an imperative necessity. Citizens, all those who have favored rebellion, directly or indirectly, have hazarded their heads to the block. If you are patriots you will be able to distinguish your friends—you will sequestrate all others. Let no consideration stop you neither age, sex nor relationship. Take by force all that a citizen has that is superfluous—for any man to have more than he requires is an abuse. There are persons who have heaps of linen, shirts and shoes: claim all this. By what right should any man keep in his wardrobes valuable or superfluous garments? Let gold, silver and all precious metals flow into the national treasury! Extirpate all forms of worship: the republican has no God but his country. All the communes of the republic will hasten to imitate that of Paris, which, on the ruins of a Gothic form of worship, is about to elevate the Temple of Reason. Aid us in striking these great blows, or we shall ourselves strike you."

These proclamations of vengeance, pillage, atheism, were so many direct reproaches to Couthon, who had held such different language a few days previously.

Conformably to the spirit of this proclamation, Fouche and Collot created commissaries of confiscation and delation. They actually awarded a sum of thirty francs on each denunciation, the sum being doubled for certain heads, such as those of nobles, priests, monks and nuns. They only gave the price of blood to him who, in person, directed the searches of the revolutionary army, and who delivered the suspected person over to the tribunal. A multitude of wretches lived upon this infamous traffic in the lives of citizens. Cellars, lofts sewers, the woods, nocturnal emigrations into the neighboring mountains, disguises of every kind, in vain were resorted to by compromised men and trembling women to conceal themselves from the incessant searches of the greedy reformer. Hunger, cold, fatigue, sickness, domiciliary visits, treason, delivered them, after some days, over to the satellites of the temporary commission.

The cells were choked with prisoners.

While proprietors and merchants were perishing, the houses were destroyed beneath the hammer. Shopkeepers, lodgers, families, expelled from the proscribed houses, had scarcely time to leave their houses, to carry off the old, the infirm, and children, to other residences. Every day the pickaxe was seen attacking stair cases, or tilers unroofing houses.

While the alarmed inhabitants were throwing their furniture out of the windows, and mothers carried the cradles of their children over the ruined rafters, twenty thousand pioneers of Auvergne and the Lower Alps were employed in razing the abodes to the ground. The cellars and foundations were blown up with gunpowder. The pay of the demolishers amounted to 400,000 francs ($80,000) for each decade; and the demolitions cost 15,000,000 of francs, ($3,000,000) to destroy a capital of more than 300,000,000 francs ($60,000,000) worth of edifices.

Hundreds of workmen perished buried beneath the walls that fell in, having been recklessly undermined. The Quai St. Clair, the two facades of the Place de Bellecour, the quais of the Saone, the street inhabited by the commercial aristocracy, the arsenals, hospitals, monasteries, churches, fortifications, pleasure houses on the sides of the hills on each bank of the river presented but the appearance of a city riddled by cannonballs after a protracted siege. Lyons, almost uninhabited, was silent in the midst of its ruins.

Workmen, without employ or bread, enrolled and subsidized by the representatives, at the cost of the rich, seemed, axe in hand, to revel over the carcass of the city which had nourished them. The noise of walls falling, the dust of destroyed houses which hung over the city, the sound of cannon fired, and the discharges of the musketry, which mowed down the inhabitants, the rolling of carts, which from the five prisons of the city conveyed the accused to the tribunal, and condemned to the guillotine, were the signs of life among the population; the scaffold was its sole spectacle—the acclamation of a people in rags, at every head which fell at their feet, was the only fete.

The Commission of Popular Justice, instituted by Couthon, was transformed, on the arrival of Ronsin and his army, into a revolutionary tribunal. The day after the arrival of this body of soldiers—these lictors of the republic—the executions began, and lasted, without interruption, for ninety days. Eight or ten condemned died every day, on leaving the tribunal, on the scaffold erected permanently in front of the steps leading to the town hall. Water and sand, spread every evening after the executions around this sewer of human blood, did not suffice to cleanse the earth. A red and fetid mud, constantly trampled by a people thirsting to see their fellow creatures die, covered the square and reeked in the air. Around these actual shambles of human flesh there was a scent of death. The exterior walls of the Palais Saint Pierre and the facade of the town hall were smeared with blood. On the morning of the days of November, December and January, the most fertile in homicides, the inhabitants of the vicinity saw rising from the soil a moisture—it was the blood of their fellow countrymen, immolated on the previous evening, the shade of the city, as it evaporated in the sunshine. Dorfeuille, on the requisition of the quarter, was compelled to remove the scaffold to a distance: he placed it over an open sewer. The blood, trickling through the planks, flowed into a ditch ten feet deep, which carried it to the Rhone, together with the filth of the neighborhood. The washerwomen were compelled to change the spot of their washing places, that they might not wash their linen and bathe their arms in bloodstained water; and

when, at last, the executions, which increased like the pulsations of an inflamed body, reached an amount of twenty, thirty, and even forty a day, the instrument of death was placed in the centre of the Pont Morand, over the river. They swept away the blood, and cast the heads and bodies over the parapets into the swiftest current of the Rhone. The sailors and peasants of the islets and lower grounds which intersect the course of the river between Lyons and the sea, found perpetually the heads and bodies of men stranded on those islets, and caught in bulrushes and osier beds which surrounded them.

These victims were nearly all the flower of the youth of Lyons and the neighboring countries. Their age was their crime, as it made them suspected of having fought. They went to death with all the daring of youth, as if they were marching to battle. In the prisons, as in bivouacs the night before the battle, they had but a handful of straw each man on which to lay their limbs on their dungeon's stones. The danger of compromising themselves by appearing to take an interest in their fate, and dying with them, did not intimidate parents, friends or servants in their tenderness. Night and day large numbers of wives, mothers and sisters wandered round the prisons. Gold and tears, which flowed abundantly, opened the hearts of jailers, and obtained for them interviews, conversations and last farewells. Escapes were frequent. Religion and charity, so active and courageous in Lyons, did not recede in presence of suspicion or disgust, but penetrated into these subterranean retreats to aid the sick and suffering, nourish the hungry, and console the dying.

More than six thousand prisoners were at a time locked up in the depots of the guillotine.

A whole generation was there swallowed up. There were assembled all the men of condition, birth, fortune and various opinions, who, since the Revolution, had embraced the opposite side, and who, in common rising against oppression, were here united in the same crime and the same death. Clergy, nobility, citizens, tradesmen, people, were all mingled there together. No citizen against whom an informer, an envious neighbor, an enemy appeared, escaped from captivity, and but few captives from death. All who had name, fortune, profession, a manufactory, a house, in town or country—any one who was suspected of any inclination to the cause of the rich, was arrested, accused, condemned and executed, by anticipation, in the minds of the proconsuls and their purveyors. The elite of a capital and several provinces—La Bresse, La Dombes, La Forez, La Beaujolais, La Vivarais, Dauphine—passed through these prisons and these scaffolds. The city and the town seemed decimated. Castles, first-class houses, manufactories, even the residences of the country people, were shut up within the circumference of twenty leagues round Lyons. Thousands of properties were sequestrated.

Doors and windows were sealed up. Nature itself seemed affected by the terror of man. The anger of the Revolution had attained the power of a divine scourge. The plagues of the middle ages did not throw more gloom over the appearance of a province. On the roads from Lyons to the neighboring villages and towns, nothing was met but detachments of the revolutionary army, forcing doors in the name of the law, searching cellars, lofts, even the litter of the cattle, striking the walls with the butts of their muskets, or leading, chained two and two, fugitives discovered in their retreats, and followed by their weeping families.

Thus were brought back to Lyons all the notable and illustrious citizens whom Couthon had allowed to escape—sheriffs, mayors, aldermen, administrators, judges, magistrates, advocates, doctors, architects, sculptors, surgeons, governors of hospitals, benevolent societies—accused of having fought with or succored the combatants or the wounded, or having given food to the insurgent people, or made secret vows for the triumph of the defenders of Lyons. To these they added the relations, sons, wives, daughters, friends and servants, assumed to be accomplices of their husbands, brothers, fathers or masters guilty of being born on the spot, and of having breathed the air of insurrection.

Daily the principal turnkey of the jail read with a loud voice the names of the prisoners summoned before the tribunal. Every breath was suspended while the summons was being read. Those thus called upon embraced for the last time their friends, and distributed their beds, quilts, clothes and money among the survivors. They assembled in long files of sixties, eighties in the court, and then threaded the crowd on their way to the tribunal. The judges were nearly all strangers, and in no way intimidated by any fear of responsibility hereafter. These five judges, each of whom separately had a human heart judged together like a mechanical instrument of murder. Watched by a suspicious mob, they themselves trembled under the terror with which they stote others. Still their activity did not satisfy Fouche and Collot d'Herbois. These representatives had promised to the Jacobins of Paris prodigies of rigorous administration, yet the slowness of these trials and sentences caused them to be accused of half-measures. The days of September were an example before them. Dorfeuille wrote to the representatives of the people: "A great act of justice is in preparation—of nature to astound future ages. To give to this act the majesty which should characterize it—that it may be as grand as history—it is requisite that the administrators, the army, magistracy and public functionaries should be present, at least by deputations. I wish this day of justice to be a festival. I say a festival: and that is the right word. When crime descends to the tomb, humanity breathes again. It is the festival of virtue."

The representatives ratified Dorfeuille's proposals, and punishment en masse supplied individual executions. The accused were conducted with unusual ceremony to the Hotel-Ville, where a summary interrogatory in a few minutes, united all in one common condemnation, and thence they marched in procession toward the banks of the Rhone where they made them cross the bridge, leaving the guillotine behind them, like a worn weapon.

On the outside of the bridge, in the lower plain of the Plateaux, they had dug a double ditch in the clay soil, between two rows of willows. Sixty-four condemned persons, handcuffed two and two, were placed in a line in this ley, beside their open sepulchre. Three pieces of cannon, loaded with ball, were placed at the extremity of the avenue. Right and left, detachments of dragoons, sword in hand, seemed waiting the signal to discharge. On the mounds of earth extracted from this ditch, the most eminent members of the municipality—presidents and orators of clubs, functionaries, military authorities, the staff of the revolutionary army, Dorfeuille and his judges—were grouped, as if on the steps of an amphitheatre; while from the top of a balcony of one of the confiscated hotels in the Quai du Rhone, Collot d'Herbois and Fouche, with telescope in hand, seemed to preside over this ceremonious extermination.

The victims sang in chorus the hymn which had led them into battle. They seemed to seek in the words of this, their last song, the forgetfulness of the blow which was about to strike them.

"To die for one's country,
Is the happiest and most enviable fate!"

The artillerymen listened, with lighted match in hand, to these dying men singing their own death-song. Dorfeuille allowed the voices to finish slowly the grave modulations of the last verse, then raising his hand as a signal, the three cannon exploded at once. The smoke concealed the guns, and for a moment hovered over the ground; drums beat, to stifle all cries. The mob pressed forward to contemplate the effect of the carnage. The artillerymen had been deceived; the undulations of the line of victims had allowed the balls to deviate, and twenty prisoners had fallen beneath the fire, dragging down with them their living companions, who were thus associated in their dying throes, and inundated with their blood. Shrieks, moans, fearful gestures, came from this confused heap of mutilated members, carcasses and survivors. The artillerymen then loaded with grape and fired; but even then the massacre was incomplete. A heart-rending cry, heard across the Rhone, even into the city, rose from this field of agony. Some limbs still palpitated, some hands were still extended toward the spectators, imploring the final blow. The soldier shuddered. "Forward, dragoons," cried Dorfeuille, "now charge." The troopers, at this command, put spurs to their horses, who dashed forward at a gallop and with the point of the sabre and pistol shots they killed the last victim. This scene of horror and agony was protracted for more than two hours!

A sullen murmur of indignation hailed the recital of this horrid scene in the city. The people felt dishonored; and compared itself to the most cruel tyrants of Rome, or the executioners of Saint Bartholomew. The representatives stifled this murmur by a proclamation which commanded that all should approve, and declared pity to be conspiracy. Citizens, even the most elegant females, then affected revolutionary rigor, and concealed their horror beneath the mask of adulation. The guillotine—instrument of punishment—became for some weeks a civic decoration and an ornament at festivals. The "taste of the day, in compliment to the representatives, made of this machine in miniature, a hideous ornament of the furniture and dress of the Jacobins. Their wives, daughters and mistresses wore small guillotines in gold, or as buckles, in the bosom, or as ear-rings!

Fouche, Collot d'Herbois and Dorfeuille sought to stifle remorse beneath the most unblushing contempt for public feeling. Two hundred and nine Lyonese prisoners were awaiting their sentence in the gloomy prison of Roanne. The sound of the cannon which had slaughtered their fellow countrymen had penetrated the dungeons of these captives. They prepared for death, and passed the night, some in prayers and confessing themselves to disguised priests, the youngest in last adieus to their youth and life, in libations and songs that braved death. Collot d'Herbois came to the prison that night, and hearing these voices, exclaimed: "What is the temper of that youth which thus sings its death-song!"

At ten o'clock in the morning a battalion drew up before the gate of the prison, whose iron jaws opening, allowed two hundred and nine citizens to pass out. The jailer counted them with his finger as they issued forth, like a herd of cattle being marked for the day's consumption. They were fastened two and two. The long file, in which each recognized a son, a brother, a parent, a friend or neighbor, advanced with a firm step toward the Hotel-de-Ville. The last farewells, extended hands, deploring looks, mute adieus, were addressed to them from windows and doors, though the hedge of bristling bayonets. Some Jacobins and a crowd of degraded women apostrophized the victims, and overwhelmed them with outrages, to which they only replied with looks of disdain, and said to those whose countenances were saddened or eyes filled with tears: "Weep not for us—one bewails martyrs."

The Hall of Law was too small to receive them, and they were sentenced in the open air, under the windows of the Hotel-de-Ville. The five judges in the costume and paraphernalia of their functions, appeared in the balcony, made out a list of names, pretended to deliberate, then pronounced a general verdict; a formality of sentence to death which gave to assassination en masse the hypocritical appearance of a legal verdict. Vainly from these two hundred voices were individual appeals, protestations of patriotism, made to the judges and the people. Inflexible judges and the sullen people only replied by contemptuous silence. The column pressed forward by the soldiers, advance toward the Pont Morand. On reaching the bridge, the officer in command counted the prisoners, to assure himself that no one had escaped on the way: instead of two hundred and nine, there are two hundred and ten. There were more than the due number of victims. Who was the innocent man?—who the guilty?—Who would legally be put to death?—who was to be assassinated without judgement?

The officer felt the horror of such a situation, halted the column, and sent word of this awful doubt to Collot d'Herbois. The solution of this scruple would have required a fresh examination: the examination would have adjourned the death of two hundred and nine. The people were there; death was waiting.—"What consequence," answered Collot d'Herbois, "is one more! 'One too many is better than one too few. Besides," he added in order to wash his hands of this murder, "he who shall die today will not die tomorrow.—Let it be all concluded!"

The extra victim was an avowed Jacobin, who filled the air with his cries, and protested in vain against this fearful error. The file resumed its march, singing—

"To die for one's country
Is the happiest and most enviable fate."

until it halted between the willows in the narrow causeway, still moistened with the blood of the previous evenings. The cuttings became shallower, and covered with fresh and soft earth, showed that the ditches were but half filled up, and were awaiting other carcasses. A long rope was extended from one willow to another. They fastened each prisoner to this rope by the end of the cord which confined his hands behind his back. Three soldiers were placed four paces off in face of each victim, and the cavalry placed in small bodies behind. At the word fire! the nine hundred and thirty soldiers at once directed three bullets against every breast. A cloud of smoke covered the scene for a moment, and then lifting, there were seen, besides the corpses strewn on the ground, or hanging to the cord, more than one hundred young men still erect. Some with wild look seemed petrified with horror; others half dead entreated their executioners to finish them; others, freed from the rope by the balls, crawled on the ground, or fled staggering towards the willows. The terror-struck spectators, the soldiers, affected by the scene, turned away their eyes in order to allow them to flee. Grandmaison, who presided this day at the execution, gave orders to the cavalry to follow the fugitives, and they were hewn down by the dragoons beneath their horses' feet. One only, named Merie, the Mayor of Macon, a patriot, but devoted to the Gironde, contrived to drag himself, bleeding as he was, to the reeds of the marsh. The troopers in pity turned aside, affecting not to see him as he made his way to the river. He was just entering a boat, in order to reach the city unobserved, when a group of merciless Jacobins recognized him by the blood that flowed from his wounded hand, and threw him headlong and living into the Rhone—dead at the same moment and the same hour by the twofold death of fire and water.

The soldiers, with great reluctance, finished with the bayonet and the butt-end of their muskets, the victims expiring in the causeway, and falling night extinguished their dying groans. Next day, when the grave diggers came to bury the dead, several bodies still palpitated, and the pioneers killed them outright with blows of the pickaxe before they covered them over with the blood-stained mould. "We have revived," wrote Collot d'Herbois to the Convention, "the progress of republican justice—it is prompt and terrible as the people's will; it should strike like thunder, and leave but ashes."

The Revolution had found its Attilas.

Montbrison, Saint Etienne, Saint Chamond all Lyonnese colonies, were the theatres of the same atrocities, or supplied victims. Javogues, the representative of the people, had set up a guillotine at Feurs, and a revolutionary tribunal, established by him, gave to the instrument of punishment the activity as at Lyons. The river provinces of the Haute-Loire were purged of all aristocratic, royalist and federalist blood, which flowed like water under the axe, which like that of Lyons, was deemed too slow, and gunpowder was used instead of steel. A magnificent alley of limes was converted into a place of execution, like the funeral willows of Brotteaux, and twenty-two persons per diem were shot there. The same impatience for death seemed to possess executioners and victims, the one had the frenzy of murder, the other the enthusiasm of death. Young girls and children begged to fall themselves beside their fathers and kinsfolk thus shot down; and daily the judges had to refuse the supplications of despair, imploring the penalty of death, less fearful than the punishment of surviving. Every day they granted or refused these requests. The barbarity of these proconsuls did not await crime, but prejudged it in name, education and rank. They struck in anticipation of future crimes. They anticipated years. They immolated infancy for its opinions to come, old age for its past opinions, woman for the crimes of tenderness and tears. Mourning was forbidden, as under Tiberius. Many were punished for having had a sorrowful countenance, or a mourning garb. Nature was distorted into an accusation, and to be pure, it had become necessary to repudiate it. All virtues were reversed in the human heart. The Jacobinism of the proconsuls of Lyons had overthrown the instincts of men: false patriotism had overthrown humanity.

Touching and sublime traits shone in this saturnalia of vengeance. The human mind rose to the tragic height of these dramas. Heroism burst forth in all ages, in all sexes. Love braved the executioners; the heart revealed mines of tenderness and magnanimity.

Young Dutaillon, only fifteen years of age conducted to death with his family, rejoiced at the foot of the scaffold that he was not separated from his father, but by a stroke of the axe. "He is keeping me a place above," he said to the executioner; 'do not let us keep him waiting!"

A son of M. de Rochefort was conducted, with his father and three relatives, to the avenue to be shot there. The soldiers fired. The three condemned fell. The boy, saved by the pity of the men, was not touched. "Mercy, mercy for him!" exclaimed the softened spectators. "He is only sixteen, and may become a good citizen." The executioners hesitated. Javogues promised his life. "No, no; none of your mercy—none of your life!" cried the youth, embracing his father, bleeding to death, "I wish for death! I am a royalist!—Vive le Roi!"

The daughter of a mechanic, a very lovely girl, was accused of refusing to wear the republican cockade. "Why are you so obstinate?" inquired the President, "that you refuse to wear the redeeming emblem of the people?" "Because you wear it," answered the young girl. The president, Parrein, admiring this courage, and blushing to send so much youth to death, made a sign to the turnkey to put a wreath in her hair. She, however observing this, snatched it thence, trampled it under foot, and then went to death.

Another, all whose relatives had been massacred on the previous evening, made his way through the crowd, and kneeling, full of despair, at the foot of the tribunal, prayed the judges to sentence him also. "You have slain my father, my brothers, my bride!" he exclaimed. "I have no longer family, love or destiny in this world: I desire death! My religion forbids me to kill myself; do you put me to death!"

A young prisoner, named Couchoux, condemned to die next day with his aged father of eighty, and deprived of the use of his legs, was cast into the cells of the Hotel-de-Ville. During the night he found means to escape, by a sewer communicating with the bed of the river. On finding the opening out, he returned to seek his father. "The old man made every effort to support himself but in vain: he fell down exhausted, conjuring his son to save his life, and abandon him to his fate. "No," replied the young man, "we will live or die together!" He then took his father on his shoulders, advanced crawling along the subterranean passage, and thus bearing his burden along undiscovered in the darkness, he found a boat on the banks of the Rhone, and entering it with him, both escaped.

A female, twenty-seven years of age, whom love had exalted to heroism during the siege, and who had fought with the intrepidity of a soldier—named Madame Cochet—harangued the people from the cart, even when conveying her to the scaffold. 'You are cowards,' she said, 'to sacrifice a woman who did her duty in fighting to defend you from oppression! It is not life that I deplore, but the child I bear in my bosom. Innocent, it will suffer my punishment. Monsters,' she added, 'they will not wait for a few days; they feared that I should produce an avenger of liberty!' The people, moved by the approaching maternity of this heroine, her youth and beauty, followed her in silence. A cry of 'mercy,' was heard from the people, but the sound of the falling knife, which cut short two lives, interrupted the tardy appeal. Forty-five heads were carried off on this day, in the tumbril of the executioner. To counterbalance these movements of pity in the multitude, hired partisans were retained by the proconsuls, and placed at the windows of the square, as in the boxes of a theatre, to insult the doomed and applaud the punishments.

A young girl of seventeen, whose features bore a marked likeness to those of Charlotte Corday, had fought by the side of her brother and lover in one of the batteries. Her name was Marie Adriae. 'What is your name?', demanded the judge, struck by her youth and beauty. 'Marie,' she replied; 'the name of the mother of that God for whom I am about to die.' 'Your age?' "Seventeen, the age of Charlotte Corday.' How, at your age, could you combat against your country?' 'I fought to defend it.' Citoyenne, said one of the jury, 'we admire your courage, what would you do if we granted you your life?' 'I would poignard you as the murderers of my country.'

She ascended the scaffold in silence, more alarmed by the gaze of the crowd than the near approach of death; refused the assistance of the executioner, and twice exclaimed, 'Vive le roi!' After her death, the executioner found among her garments a note written in blood: it was the farewell letter of her lover, who had been shot some days before, in the Plaine des Brotteaux. 'To-morrow at this hour I shall have ceased to live,' he wrote; 'I cannot die without telling thee, for the last time, how well I love thee: and were they to offer me my pardon on condition I would say the contrary, I would not accept it. I have no ink, and I write to thee with my blood, which I would fain mingle with thine for all eternity. Adieu, dear Marie; weep not, in order that the angels in heaven may deem thee as beautiful as I do. I shall await thee—tarry not.' The two lovers were only separated by four-and-twenty hours; the people knew how to admire, but not to pardon.

The executions en masse only ceased in consequence of the indignant refusal of the soldiers to be converted into executioners.—'Do you need a more active executioner?' wrote the Jacobin Achard, to Collot d'Herbois, 'I offer my services.' The corpses that covered the banks of the Rhone threatened to cause a pestilence, and the adjoining towns and villages complained of the infected state of the air and the water. The Jacobins rekindled their enthusiasm by patriotic banquets, at which Dorfeuille, Achard, Grandmaison, and the principal judges and assistants, drank to the rapidity of death, and the activity of the headsman. "Republicans," exclaimed Dorfeuille, "this banquet is worthy the sovereign people. Let us, administrators, members of the tribunals, public functionaries, meet daily to quaff out of the same goblet the blood of tyrants!"

Collot d'Herbois, recalled to Paris on the first expressions of indignation called forth by these massacres, just fired himself to the Jacobins. 'We are called Anthropophagi,' said he; 'they are aristocrats who give us this appellation. They carefully inquire into the death of the anti-revolutionists, and spread abroad the report that they do not perish at the first stroke. The Jacobin Chalier did not die at the first blow; the last drop of patriotic blood that flows seems wrung from my heart. I have no pity for conspirators: we have shot two hundred at a time, and yet this is imputed to us as a crime. And yet is not this a fresh proof of sensibility—the thunder of the people strikes them and reduces them to ashes!'' The Jacobins loudly applauded him.

Fouche, who had remained at Lyons, wrote to Collot d'Herbois, to congratulate him on their mutual triumph. 'And we also combat the enemies of the republic at Toulon by offering them the spectacle of the corpses of their accomplices. Let us crush at once, in our wrath, all the rebels, all the conspirators, all the traitors.' Let us exercise justice after the example of nature, and avenge ourselves like a great nation. Let us strike with the force of the thunderbolt, and let the very ashes of our foes disappear forever from the soil of freedom. Let the republic be a vast volcano. Adieu, my friend; tears of joy gush from my eyes, and inundate my soul. We have but one manner of celebrating our victory. This evening we shall send two hundred and thirteen rebels to meet their doom beneath the fire of our cannon.