Josephine, on the bosom of her husband, wept hot, burning tears as he communicated to her his irrevocable decision not to leave France, but in the depths of her heart she experienced a noble satisfaction to find her husband so heroic and so brave, and, offering him her hand, said with tears in her eyes:
“It is well—we remain; and if we must go to the scaffold, we will at least die together.”
The general, with his wife and children, retired to his small property, Ferte-Beauharnais, where he longed to obtain rest during a few happy months of quietude.
But the fearful storms which had agitated France in her innermost life, now raged so violently that each household, each family, trembled; there was neither peace nor rest in the home nor in the hearts of men.
The Convention, threatened from outside by failures and defeats—for the capture of Mayence by the Prussians and Austrians had been followed by the capture of Toulon in September by the English—the Convention wanted to consolidate at least its internal authority, and to terrify by severe measures those who, on account of the misfortunes on the frontiers, might hope for a fresh change of affairs in the interior, and who might help it to pass.
Consequently the Convention issued a decree ordering all dismissed or destitute soldiers to return in four-and-twenty hours to their respective municipalities, under pain of ten years in chains, and at the same time forbade them to enter Paris or to approach the capital nearer than ten leagues.
A second decree ordered the formation of a revolutionary army in Paris, to which was assigned the duty of carrying out the decrees of the Convention.
Finally a third decree, which appeared on the 17th of September, ordered the arrest and punishment of all suspected persons.
This decree thus characterized the suspected ones: “All those who, by their conduct, their relations, their discourses, their writings, had shown themselves the adherents of tyranny, of federalism, the enemies of liberty, much more all the ex-nobles, men, women, fathers, brothers, sons or daughters, sisters or brothers, or agents of the migrated ones, all who had not invariably exhibited and proved their adherence to the revolution.”
With this decree the days of terror had reached their deepest gloom; with this decree began the wild, bloody hunting down of aristocrats and ci-devants; then began suspicions, accusations which needed no evidence to bring the accused to the guillotine; then were renewed the dragonnades of the days of Louis XIV., only that now, instead of Protestants, the nobles were hunted down, and hunted down to death. The night of the St. Bartholomew, the night of the murderess Catharine de Medicis and of her mad son Charles IX., found now in France its cruel and bloody repetition; only this night of horror was prolonged during the day, and shrank not back from the light.