“13th May, 1793.
“I enclose, Citizen, the copy of a letter from Citizen Chaumette, solicitor to the Commune of Paris, by which you will perceive that complaints are made that, after these public executions, the blood of the criminals remains in pools upon the place, and that dogs come to drink it, and that crowds of men feed their eyes with this spectacle, which naturally instigates their hearts to ferocity and blood.
“I request you, therefore, to take the earliest and most convenient measures to remove from the eyes of men a sight so afflicting to humanity.”
Our readers will observe the tender regret—not that all this blood was shed, but that it was not wiped up; and they will be startled when they recollect that at the date of this letter not above a dozen persons had been yet executed there, but that within one year the blood of a thousand victims had saturated the same small spot of ground.
In one of the foolish modern-antique processions of the Convention, the whole cortège was delayed and thrown into confusion because the cattle that were drawing some of their theatrical machines could neither be induced nor forced to traverse this blood-tainted place.
This Chaumette was one of the most impious and sanguinary of the whole tribe, and we could almost believe that he envied the dogs the blood they drank. He it was that bullied the wretched idiot Gobel, revolutionary Archbishop of Paris, to come to the bar of the Convention to abjure Christianity, and proclaim himself an impostor, at the head of a procession in which asses were insultingly decorated with the sacred emblems of religion.
Chaumette himself it was who introduced to the Convention a prostitute in the character of the Goddess of Reason. Robespierre sent this whole clique to the guillotine, and on the 13th of April, 1794, Chaumette’s own blood flowed to increase the horrors of which he had complained.
The guillotine remained in permanence in the Place de la Révolution till the 8th of June, 1794, when the inhabitants of the streets through which the batches (“fournées”), as they were called, of sufferers used to pass, became at last tired of the agreeable sight, and solicited its removal.
Robespierre seems at this time to have adopted a new policy, to have formed some design of founding a dictatorial authority in his own person on the basis of religion and morals.
On the 7th June he made his famous report acknowledging “l’Etre Suprême,” and appointed the 20th June for the great fête in the gardens of the Tuileries, which was to celebrate this recognition.