but the desperate bravery of these amply made up for every want. During the space of sixty days they withstood an army of fifteen times their strength, plentifully provisioned, and provided with every instrument of destruction. Never, perhaps, were there such feats of valour performed as by this little army; thrice their numbers did they lay dead before their injured city.
The members deputed from the Convention to direct the attack, left nothing untried that might tend to the accomplishment of their object. They succeeded at last, in opening a communication with their partizans in the city, and in seducing many of the mob to espouse their interest. This was the more easy to effect, as the besieged were, by this time, upon the point of starving; the flesh of horses, dogs, and cats, had been for some days their only food, and even that began to grow extremely scarce. In this situation, without the least hopes of succour, some of those who wished well to their city, and who had not borne arms during the siege, undertook to capitulate with the enemy; but these, knowing the extremities to which they were driven, insisted upon executing the decrees of the Convention, which ordered them to put to death indiscriminately, all those who had taken up arms against its authority.
The besieged, then, seeing no hopes of a capitulation, seeing the city without another day’s provision, and the total impossibility of succour from without (being completely invested on every side), had but one measure to adopt; to cut their way through their enemy, or fall in the attempt. A plan of retreat was therefore settled upon; the outposts were to be called in, and the whole were to assemble at the Vaise.
In the mean time, the deputies from the Convention, who were informed by their spies of all that was passing in the city, took care to have the road by which the retreating army was to pass, well lined with troops. The whole country round was under arms. Every person was ordered, on pain of death, not to let pass, or give shelter to, a single Lyonnese, man, woman, or child.
The out-posts were hardly called in, when their stations were taken possession of by the democratic army. Being so closely pressed, rendered the assembling more difficult; all was bustle, confusion, and terror. Not half of these who were under arms had time to join. A little corps was, however, at last formed. It consisted of between three and four thousand persons in all, headed by four field-pieces, and followed by six waggons, bearing the wreck of many a splendid fortune. Thus marched off the remains of these generous defenders of their city, bidding an eternal adieu to the scenes of their youth, the dwellings of their ancestors; resolving to die bravely, as they had lived, or find an asylum in a foreign land.
It was midnight when they began their retreat, lighted by the blaze of bombs and burning houses.——Reader, cast your eyes on this devoted city. See children clinging to their fathers, distracted mothers to their sons; wives, holding in their arms what they held dearer than life, forgetting all but their husbands, marching by their side, and braving death from ten thousand hands!
They had hardly begun their march, when a discharge of artillery, bearing full upon them, threw them into some confusion. One of their waggons, in which were several old men and some children, was set on fire by a shell. Morning coming on, they perceived themselves beset on every side; they were charged by the cavalry, exposed to the fire of a numerous artillery, harassed at every turning, fired upon from every house, every bank and every hedge. Seeing therefore no hopes of escape, they were determined to sell every drop of blood as dear as possible. They broke off into platoons, putting their wives and children in the centre of each, and took different directions, in order to divide the force of the enemy. But what were they to do against fifty times their number? The whole, about fifty persons excepted, were either killed or taken.
The victors showed such mercy as might be expected from them: not content with butchering their prisoners in cold blood, they took a pleasure in making them die by inches, and insulting them in the pangs of death. Placing several together, they killed one of them at a time to render death more terrible to the rest. Neither sex nor age had any weight with them; above two hundred women, thirty of whom had children at the breast, whom conjugal love had led to follow their husbands; more than fifty old men, whom filial piety had snatched from the assassin’s stab, were all most savagely butchered. The death of Madame de Visague deserves particular notice. This young lady was about seventeen years of age, and very near her time of delivery: a party of the democrats found her behind a hedge, to which place she had drawn her husband, who was mortally wounded. When the cannibals discovered her, she was on her knees supporting his head with her arm: one of them fired upon her with a carabine, another quartered her with his hanger, while a third held up the expiring husband to be a spectator of their more than hellish cruelty.
Several wounded prisoners were collected together, and put into a ditch, with sentinels placed round them to prevent them from killing themselves, or one another; and thus were they made to linger, some of them two or three days, while their enemies testified their ferocious pleasure by all the insulting gesticulations of savages.
Such was the fury of the triumphant democrats, that the deputies from the Convention gave an order against burying the dead, till they had been cut in morsels. Tollet, the infamous Tollet, a democratic priest (that is to say, an apostate) of Trevoux, went, blood-hound like, in quest of a few unhappy wretches who had escaped the bloody 9th of October; and when, by perfidious promises, he had drawn them from their retreats, he delivered them up to the daggers of their assassins.
Of all the little army that attempted the retreat, only about forty-six escaped; six hundred and eighteen were brought back in chains; some of them died of their wounds, and all those who were not relieved from life this way, were dragged forth to an ignominious death.
During these dreadful scenes the deputies from the Convention, who were now absolute masters of the unfortunate city, were preparing others, if possible, still more dreadful. As a preliminary step, they reorganized the Democratic Society. To this infernal rendezvous the deputy Javouges repaired, and there broached his project in a speech, the substance of which was nearly as follows: After having represented Challier as a martyr in the cause of liberty, as the hero of the republic, and the avenger of the people, he addressed himself to the assembly in nearly these terms. “Think,” said he, “of the slavery into which you are plunged by being the servants and workmen of others; the nobles, the priests, the proprietors, the rich of every description, have long been in a combination to rob the democrats, the real sans culotte republicans, of their birthright; go, citizens; take what belongs to you, and what you should have enjoyed long ago.—Nor must you stop here, while there exists an aristocracy in the buildings, half remains undone: down with those edifices raised for the profit or pleasure of the rich; down with them all: commerce and arts are useless to a warlike people, and destructive of that sublime equality which France is determined to spread over the whole globe.” He told this enslaved, this degraded populace, that it was the duty of every good citizen to discover all those whom be knew to be guilty of having, in thought, word, or deed, conspired against the republic. He exhorted them to fly to the offices (opened for receiving such accusations), and not to spare one lawyer, priest, or nobleman. He concluded this harangue, worthy of one of the damned, with declaring, that for a man to accuse his own father was an act of civism worthy a true republican, and that to neglect it was a crime that should be punished with death.
The deeds that followed this diabolic exhortation were such as might be expected. The bloody ruffians of democrats left not a house, not a hole unsearched; men and women were led forth from their houses with as little ceremony as cattle from their pens; the square where the guillotine stood was reddened with blood, like a slaughter-house, while the piercing cries of the surviving relations were drowned in the more vociferous howlings of Vive la Republique!
It is hard to stifle the voice of nature, to stagnate the involuntary movements of the soul; yet this was attempted, and in some degree effected, by the deputies of the Convention. Perceiving that these scenes of blood had spread a gloom over the countenances of the innocent inhabitants, and that even some of their soldiers seemed touched with compunction, they issued a mandate, declaring every one suspected of aristocracy, who should discover the least symptoms of pity, either by his words or his looks!
The preamble of this mandate makes the blood run cold: “By the thunder of God! in the name of the representatives of the French people; on pain of death it is ordered,” &c. &c.