3. in the court of the Abaye the cry of the auctioneer selling the clothes of the dead;
4. the rumbling of carts on the pavement bearing away 1,300 corpses;
5. the songs of the women mounted aloft on the carts, beating time on the naked bodies.[31129]
Is there a man who, after one of these encounters, does not see himself in imagination before the green table of the section committee, after this, in prison with sabers over his head, and then in the cart in the midst of the bloody pile?
Courage falters before a vision like this. All the journals approve, palliate, or keep silent; nobody dares offer resistance.[31130] Property as well as lives belong to whoever wants to take them. At the barriers, at the markets, on the boulevard of the Temple, thieves, decked with the tricolor ribbon, stop people as they pass along, seize whatever they carry, and, under the pretext that jewels should be deposited on the altars of Patriotism, take purses, watches, rings, and other articles, so rudely that women who are not quick enough, have the lobes of their ears torn in unhooking their earrings[31131]. Others, installed in the cellars of the Tuileries, sell the nation's wine and oil for their own profit. Others, again, given their liberty eight days before by the people, scent out a bigger job by finding their way into the Garde-meuble and stealing diamonds to the value of thirty millions.[31132]
Like a man struck on the head with a mallet, Paris, felled to the ground, lets things go; the authors of the massacre have fully attained their ends. The faction has fast hold of power, and will maintain its hold. Neither in the Legislative Assembly nor in the Convention will the aims of the Girondins be successful against its tenacious usurpation. It has proved by a striking example that it is capable of anything, and boasts of it; it is still armed, it stands there ever prepared and anonymous on its murderous basis, with its speedy modes of operation, its own group of fanatical agents and bravos, with Maillard and Fournier, with its cannon and its pikes. All that does not live within it lives only through its favor from day to day, through its good will. Everybody knows that. The Assembly no longer thinks of dislodging people who meet decrees of expulsion with massacre; it is no longer a question of auditing their accounts, or of keeping them within the confines of the law. Their dictatorship is not to be disputed, and their purification continue. From four to five hundred new prisoners, arrested within eleven days, by order of the municipality, by the sections, and by this or that individual Jacobin, are crowded into cells still dripping with blood, and the report is spread that, on the 20th of September, the prisons will be emptied by a second massacre.[31133]—Let the Convention, if it pleases, pompously install itself as sovereign, and grind out decrees—it makes no difference; regular or irregular, the government still marches on in the hands of those who hold the sword.[31134] The Jacobins, through sudden terror, have maintained their illegal authority; through a prolongation of terror they are going to establish their legal authority. A forced suffrage is going to put them in office at the Hôtel-de-ville, in the tribunals, in the National Guard, in the sections, and in the various administrations, while they have already elected to the Convention, Marat, Danton, Fabre d'Eglantine, Camille Desmoulins, Manuel, Billaud-Varennes, Panis, Sergent, Collot d'Herbois, Robespierre, Legendre, Osselin, Fréron, David, Robert, Lavicourterie, in short, the instigators, leaders and accomplices of the massacre.[31135] Nothing that could force or falsify voting is omitted.[31136] In the first place the presence of the people is imposed on the electoral assembly, and, to this end, it is transferred to the large hall of the Jacobin club, under the pressure of the Jacobin galleries. As a second precaution, every opponent is excluded from voting, every Constitutionalist, every former member of the monarchical club, of the Feuillants, and of the Sainte-Chapelle club, of the Feuillants, and of the Sainte-Chapelle club, every signer of the petition of the 20,000, or of that of the 8,000, and, on the sections protesting against this, their protest is thrown out on the ground of its being the fruit of "an intrigue." Finally, at each balloting, each elector's vote is called out, which ensures the right vote beforehand, the warnings he has received being very explicit.[31137] On the 2nd of September, during the first meeting of the electoral body, held at the bishop's palace, the Marseilles troop, 500 yards away, came and took the twenty-four priests from the town-hall, and, on the way, hacked them to pieces on the Pont-Neuf. Throughout the evening and all night the agents of the municipality carried on their work at the Abbaye, at the Carmelites, and at La Force, and, on the 3rd of September, on the electoral assembly transferring itself to the Jacobin club, it passed over the Pont-au-Change between two rows of corpses, which the slaughterers had brought there from the Châtelet and the Conciergerie prisons.
3101 ([return])
[ Thierry, son of Clovis, unwilling to take part in an expedition of his brothers into Burgundy, was told by his men: "If thou art unwilling to march into Burgundy with thy brothers, we will leave thee and follow them in thy place."—Clotaire, another of his sons, disposed to make peace with the Saxons, "the angry Francs rush upon him, revile him, and threaten to kill him if he declines to accompany them. Upon which he puts himself at their head.">[