forbidding men to weep, or look sorrowful, on pain of death, concluded with, Vive la Liberté! (Liberty for ever!)? Who would believe that the people, who suffered this mandate to be stuck up about their city like a play-bill, had sworn to live free, or die?
However, in spite of all their menaces, they still found that remorse would sometimes follow the murder of a friend, or relation. Conscience is a troublesome guest to the villain who yet believes in an hereafter; the deputies, therefore, were resolved to banish this guest from the bosoms of their partisans, as it had already been banished from their own.
With this object in view they ordered a solemn civic festival in honour of Challier. His image was carried round the city, and placed in the churches. Those temples which had (many of them), for more than a thousand years, resounded with hosannas to the Supreme Being, were now profaned by the adorations paid to the image of a parricide.
All this was but a prelude to what was to follow the next day. It was Sunday, the day consecrated to the worship of our blessed Redeemer. A vast concourse of democrats, men and women, assembled at a signal agreed on, formed themselves into a sort of a mock procession, preceded by the image of Challier, and followed by a little detached troop, each bearing in its hand a chalice, or some other vase of the church. One of these sacrilegious wretches led an ass, covered with a priest’s vestment, and with a mitre on his head. He was loaded with crucifixes and other symbols of the Christian religion, and had the Old and New Testament suspended to his tail. Arrived at the square called the Terreaux, they then threw the two Testaments, the crucifixes, &c. into a fire prepared for the purpose; made the ass drink out of the sacramental cup, and were proceeding to conclude their diabolical profanations with the massacre of all the prisoners, to appease the ghost of Challier, when a violent thunder-storm put an end to their meeting, and deferred the work of death for a few hours.
The pause was not long. The deputies, profiting by the infamous frenzy with which they had inspired the soldiery and the mob, and by the consternation of the respectable inhabitants, continued their butchery with redoubled fury. Those who led the unhappy sufferers to execution were no longer ordered to confine themselves to such as were entered on the list of proscription, but were permitted to take whoever they thought worthy of death! To have an enemy among the democrats, to be rich, or even thought rich, was a sufficient crime. The words nobleman, priest, lawyer, merchant, and even honest man, were so many terms of proscription. Three times was the place of the guillotine changed, at every place holes were dug to receive the blood, and yet it ran in the gutters! the executioners were tired, and the deputies, enraged to see that their work went on so slowly, represented to the mob that they were too merciful, that vengeance lingered in their hands, and that their enemies ought to perish in mass!
Accordingly next day, the execution in mass began. The prisoners were led out, from a hundred to three hundred at a time, into the outskirts of the city, where they were fired upon or stabbed. One of these massacres deserves a particular notice. Two hundred and sixty-nine persons, taken indiscriminately among all classes and all ages, were led to Brotteaux, and there tied to trees. In this situation they were fired upon with grape-shot. Here the cannoneers of Valenciennes, who had not had the courage to defend their own walls, who owed theirforfeited lives to the mercy of royalists, valiantly pointed their cannons against them, when they found them bound hand and foot!—The coward is ever cruel.—Numbers of these unfortunate prisoners had only their limbs broken by the artillery; these were dispatched with the sword or the musket. The greatest part of the bodies were thrown into the Rhone, some of them before they were quite dead; two men in particular had strength enough to swim to a sand-bank in the river. One would have thought, that thus saved as it were by miracle, the vengeance of their enemies would have pursued them no farther; but no sooner were they perceived, than a party of the dragoons of Lorraine crossed the arm of the river and stabbed them, and left them a prey to the fowls of the air.—Reader, fix your eyes on this theatre of carnage.—You barbarous, you ferocious monsters! You have found the heart to commit those bloody deeds, and shall no one have the heart to publish them in a country that boasts of an unbounded liberty of the press? Shall no one tell, with what pleasure you plunged your daggers into the defenceless breasts of those whose looks had often appalled your own coward hearts? Shall no one tell, with what heroic, what godlike constancy they met their fate? How they smiled at all your menaces and cannibal gesticulations? How they despised you in the very article of death?—Strewed with every sweetest flower be the grave of Mons. Chapuis de Maubourg, and let his name be graven on every faithful heart! This gallant gentleman, who was counted one of the first engineers in Europe, fell into the hands of the democrats. They offered to spare his life, if he would serve in the armies of the Convention: they repeated this offer, with their carabines at his breast. “No,” replied he, “I have never fought but for my God and my king; despicable cowards! fire away!”
The murder in mass did not rob the guillotine of its prey: there the blood flowed without interruption. Death itself was not a refuge from democratic fury. The bodies of the prisoners who were dead of their wounds, and of those who, not able to support the idea of ignominious death, had given themselves the fatal blow, were carried to the scaffold, and there beheaded, receiving thousands of kicks from the sans culottes, because the blood would not run from them. Persons from their sick beds, old men, not able to walk, and even women found in child-bed, were carried to the murderous machine. The respectable Mons. Lauras was torn from his family of ten children and his wife big with the eleventh. This distracted matron ran with her children, and threw herself at the feet of the brutal deputy Collot d’Herbois.—No mercy!—Her conjugal tenderness, the cries of her children, every thing calculated to soften the heart, presented themselves before him, but in vain. “Take away,” said he, to the officious ruffians by whom he was surrounded, “take away the she rebel and her whelps.” Thus spurned from the presence of him who alone was able to save her beloved husband, she followed him to the place of execution. Her shrieks, when she saw him fall, joined to the wildness of her looks, but too plainly foretold her approaching end. She was seized with the pains of childbirth, and was carried home to her house; but, as if her tormentors had shown her too much lenity, the sans culotte commissary soon after arrived, took possession of all the effects in the name of the sovereign people, drove her from her bed and her house, from the door of which she fell dead in the street. Ref 022
About three hundred women hoped, by their united prayers and tears, to touch the hearts of the ferocious deputies; but all their efforts were as vain as those of Madame Lauras. They were threatened with a discharge of grape shot. Two of them, who, notwithstanding the menaces of the democrats, still had the courage to persist, were tied during six hours to the posts of the guillotine; their own husbands were executed before their eyes, and their blood sprinkled over them!
Mademoiselle Servan, a lovely young woman of about eighteen years of age, was executed, because she would not discover the retreat of her father! “What!” said she nobly, to the democratic committee, “what! betray my father! impious villains, how dare you suppose it?”
Madame Cochet, a lady equally famed for her beauty and her courage, was accused of having put the match to a cannon during the siege, and of having assisted in her husband’s escape. She was condemned to suffer death; she declared herself with child, and the truth of this declaration was attested by two surgeons. In vain did she implore a respite, in vain did she plead the innocence of the child that was in her womb: her head was severed from her body amidst the death-howl of the democratic brigands.
Pause, here, reader, and imagine if you can, another crime worthy of being added to those already mentioned. Yes, there is one more, and hell would not have been satisfied if its ministers had left it uncommitted. Libidinous brutality! Javouges, one of the deputies from the Convention, opened the career. His example was followed by the soldiery and the mob in general. The wives and daughters of almost all the respectable inhabitants, particularly of such as had emigrated, or who were murdered or in prison, were put in a state of requisition, and were ordered on pain of death, to hold their bodies (I spare the reader the term made use of in the decree) in readiness for the embraces of the true republicans! Nor were they content with violation: the first ladies of the city were led to the tree of Liberty (of Liberty!) and there made to take the hands of chimney-sweepers and common felons! Detestable wretches! At the very name of democrat, humanity shudders, and modesty hides its