[174] The meaning of this much misunderstood phrase was simply that the citizens were ready to sacrifice their lives in defence of the revolutionary principles.
[175] The services seem to have been not very dissimilar to a modern Ethical Society meeting. The notorious Festival of the 20th Brumaire was a Fête of Liberty not of Reason, the mistake being due to a careless transcription in the procès-verbal of the Convention. A living representative of Liberty was chosen as less likely to tend to idolatry than an image of stone. See La Révolution Française, 14th April 1899, La Déesse de la Liberté.
[176] "The collapse of the Empire is tremendous. I have no pity for the melodramatic villain who ends as he began, in causeless and wanton blood." Lord Coleridge, Life, ii., p. 172.
[177] "We could rouse no enthusiasm," said the head of a State Department to the writer at the time of the Fashoda incident, "even for a war for the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, much less against England."
[178] Open 11-4 or 5. Closed Mondays and Chief Festivals.
[179] Open daily, except Sundays, 11-4.
[180] This portal suffered much from the vandalism of Soufflot and his clerical employers of the eighteenth century (p. [252]): all that remains of the original carvings in the tympanum is a portion of the figure of Christ and the angels. The Revolutionary Chaumette, when it was proposed to destroy the Gothic simulacra of superstition, protected the carvings on the west portals on the plea that they related to astronomy, to philosophy and the arts. The astronomer Dupuis was added to the Commission and the reliefs were saved.
[181] Now (1911) demolished.
[182] Notes exist of payments in 1502, 1505 to Pierre Gringoire, histrion et facteur for the mysteries—well and honestly performed—at the entries of Madame la reine, before the portail of the Châtelet.
[183] Permission to visit on Thursdays, 9-5, to be obtained by written application to the Prefect of Police, Rue de Lutèce.