The universal consternation of the patriots as they learned of the murder of the Friend of the People was an additional proof of the immense influence exercised by this extraordinary man over their heads and hearts. All over Paris these verses were placarded:
| People, Marat is dead, the lover of the land; |
| Your friend, your aid, the hope of all who would be free |
| Is fallen 'neath the blow of an accursed band; |
| Weep—but remember, avenged must he be! |
This morning I received a letter from Victoria. She informs me that Oliver's health is being restored, and that he soon will prove to me that my affection for him was not misplaced. In a few lines in his own hand at the end of Victoria's letter, Oliver himself repeated the same pledges. What is her project? I know not. She has at least saved the unhappy boy from suicide.
JULY 30, 1793.—The royalist and "federalist" insurrection of Lyons, Marseilles, Toulon and Bordeaux against the Republic and the Convention has assumed a more threatening aspect through the war that broke out in the Vendee, and which is spreading amid scenes of ungovernable ferocity. Read, sons of Joel, and shudder at the atrocious reprisals, the nameless horrors, committed by the Vendeans under the leadership of their priests and the ex-nobles. If the law of retaliation, that savage and barbarous law, is ever applied to the Chouans and Vendeans by the avengers of the patriots, let the responsibility fall upon the heads of these madmen themselves.
The brigands of the Vendee themselves gave the signal and set the example for murder and massacre. Machecoul was the theater of scenes of horror. Eight hundred patriots were hatcheted to pieces. Several were buried alive. The women were forced to witness the torture of their husbands; then, together with their children, they were spiked hand and foot to the doors of their dwellings, where they expired under the blows and stabs of the assassins. The parish curate, who had taken the oath to the Constitution, was impaled on a spit, and marched through the streets and public places of Machecoul with his genitals cut off. Finally, still breathing, he was nailed to the liberty tree. A Vendean priest celebrated the mass standing in blood and upon mutilated corpses. In the swamps of Niort six hundred children of Nantes were rounded up, massacred, and atrociously mutilated. At Chollet the brigands repeated the frightful scenes of Machecoul. They put the patriots through the most terrible tortures before depriving them of their lives. There, also, they nailed the women and children alive to their house-doors, and made their bosoms a target for their bayonets. They put to the torture everywhere those patriots whom they found, or persons who would not bear arms against the Republic. When they captured Saumur, all who bore the reputation of patriot perished amid indescribable tortures. The women, their children in their arms, were thrown from the windows, and the tigers in the streets poniarded them. The agonies which they made our brave defenders undergo were no less cruel; the least barbarous was to slay them with ball or bayonet; but the most common was to hang them feet uppermost from trees and kindle bonfires under their heads; or to nail them alive to the trees; or to place cartridges in their mouths or nostrils and explode them. It is impossible to take a step in the Vendee without opening new perspectives of torture to the eye. Here, at the entrance of one village, are exposed to our view brave defenders of the Republic hewed to pieces or spiked to the doors of their dwellings. There, the fringe of trees at the edge of a wood displays to us the disfigured forms of our brave brothers hanged from the branches, their bodies half burned. Yonder, we discern their lifeless corpses bound, nailed to trees, to pieces of timber, mutilated, riddled with wounds, their faces burned and baked. Nor did the brigands confine themselves to these inhuman tortures. They filled their country ovens with our defenders, kindled the fires, and left them to expire slowly in this atrocious agony. Recently these cannibals have invented a new manner of torture; they cut off the noses, hands and feet of their prisoners, shut them in their dark caves, and abandon them to perish of hunger.
The distinguished patriot Chalier, at the head of a list of eighty-three, was led to the scaffold at Lyons. The instrument worked poorly. Chalier was twice mutilated. The cruelties of the royalists and parishioners of Lyons will call down great calamities upon the city.
AUGUST 2, 1793.—Often did my sister and I wonder at receiving no news from Prince Franz of Gerolstein, our relative, and one of the most ardent of the Illuminati. The secret of Franz's silence has just been revealed to me. An officer of the garrison of Mayence, long a prisoner in the duchy of Deux Ponts, adjoining the principality of Gerolstein, informed me to-day that for four years, the length of time since Franz left us, the latter was held in a state prison by order of his father, the reigning prince. So did Franz of Gerolstein expiate in harsh captivity his sympathy with the new ideas.
AUGUST 4, 1793.—The Convention passed yesterday a decree of marked Socialist and revolutionary character:
The National Convention, in consideration of the evils which monopolists inflict upon society by their murderous speculations in the most pressing necessaries of life and upon the public misery, decrees:
Article 1.—Monopoly is a capital crime....