The Royalist insurrection in La Vendée, after a long and terrible conflict, was crushed out. No language can describe the horrors of vengeance which ensued. The tale of brutality is too awful to be told. Demons could not have been more infernal in mercilessness.
"Death by fire and the sword," writes Lamartine, "made a noise, scattered blood, and left bodies to be buried and be counted. The silent waters of the Loire were dumb and would render no account. The bottom of the sea alone would know the number of the victims. Carrier caused mariners to be brought as pitiless as himself. He ordered them, without much mystery, to pierce plug-holes in a certain number of decked vessels, so as to sink them with their living cargoes in parts of the river.
"These orders were first executed secretly and under the color of accidents of navigation. But soon these naval executions, of which the waves of the Loire bore witness even to its mouth, became a spectacle for Carrier and for his courtiers. He furnished a galley of pleasure, of which he made a present to his accomplice Lambertye, under pretext of watching the banks of the river. This vessel, adorned with all the delicacies of furniture, provided with all the wines and all the necessaries of feasting, became the most general theatre of these executions. Carrier embarked therein sometimes himself, with his executioners and his courtesans, to make trips upon the water. While he yielded himself up to the joys of love and wine on deck, his victims, inclosed in the hold, saw, at a given signal, the valves open, and the waves of the Loire swallow them up. A stifled groaning announced to the crew that hundreds of lives had just breathed their last under their feet. They continued their orgies upon this floating sepulchre.
MASSACRES IN LYONS.
"Sometimes Carrier, Lambertye, and their accomplices rejoiced in the cruel pleasure of this spectacle of agony. They caused victims of either sex, in couples, to mount upon the deck. Stripped of their garments, they bound them face to face, one to the other—a priest with a nun, a young man with a young girl. They suspended them, thus naked and interlaced, by a cord passed under the shoulders through a block of the vessel. They sported with horrible sarcasms on this parody of marriage in death, and then flung the victims into the river. This cannibal sport was termed 'Republican Marriages.'"
DROWNING VICTIMS IN THE LOIRE.