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girls of the amphitheatre descended into the street, now strewed with flowers, and walked before the car. The Théâtre Français, then situated in the Faubourg St. Germain, had erected a triumphal arch on its peristyle. On each pillar a medallion was fixed, bearing in letters of gilt bronze the title of the principal dramas of the poet; on the pedestal of the statue erected before the door of the theatre was written, 'He wrote Irène at eighty-three years; at seventeen he wrote Edipus.'

"The immense procession did not arrive at the Pantheon until ten o'clock at night, for the day had not been sufficiently long for this triumph..

"If we judge of men by what they have done, then Voltaire is incontestably the greatest writer of modern Europe. No one has caused, through the powerful influence of his genius alone, and the perseverance of his will, so great a commotion in the minds of men; his pen aroused a world, and has shaken a far mightier empire than that of Charlemagne, the European empire of a theocracy. His genius was not force, but light. Heaven had des

tined him, not to destroy, but to illuminate, and wherever he trod, light followed him, for reason (which is light) had destined him to be first her poet, then her apostle, and lastly her idol.". Vol. 1. pp. 149-152.

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"The five hundred and seventy-five carcasses of the Châtelet and the Conciergerie were piled up in heaps on the Pont-duChange. At night, troops of children, revelling in these three days' murders, and with whom dead carcasses had become things of sport, lighted up small lamps by these heaps of slain, and danced the Carmagnole, whilst the Marseillaise was sung all over the city. Lamps, lanterns, pitch torches, mingled their pale lights with that of the moon, which beamed on these heaps of victims these hacked trunks - these severed heads these pools of blood. The same night, Henriot, spy and swindler under the monarchy, assassin and executioner under the people, at the head of a band of twenty or thirty men, directed and executed the massacre of ninety-two priests of the seminary of Saint Firmin. Henriot's satellites, pursuing the priests through corridors and into cells, flung them, still alive, out of the windows on to a forest of pikes, spits, and bayonets, which transfixed them when they fell. Women, to whom the butchers then resigned them, finished the bloody work with billets of wood, and then dragged the mangled bodies through the kennels. The same scenes polluted the cloisters of the Bernardins.

"Yet already in Paris victims were not in sufficient quantity to satisfy the thirst excited by these ninety-two hours of massacre.

"The prisons were empty. Henriot and the butchers, more than two hundred in number, reinforced by the wretches recruited in the prisons, went to the Bicêtre with seven pieces of cannon, which the Commune allowed them to take with impunity.

"Bicêtre, a vast sewer, wherein flowed all the refuse in the kingdom, in order to purify the population of lunatics, mendicants, or incorrigible criminals, contained three thousand five hundred prisoners. Their blood contained nothing of political taint; but, pure or impure, it was still more blood! The ruffians forced in the gates of the Bicêtre, drove in the dungeon doors with cannon, dragged out the prisoners, and began a slaughter, which endured five nights and five days. Vainly did the Commune send commissaries, — vainly did Pétion himself harangue the assassins. They hardly ceased from their work to listen to the admonitions of the mayor. To words without force the people only lend a respect without obedience. The cutthroats only paused before a want of occupation. Next day, the same band, of about two hundred and fifty men, armed with guns, pikes, axes, clubs, attacked the hospital of the Salpêtrière, at the same time a hospital and a prison, which contained only prostitutes,a place of correction for the old, reformation for the young, and asylum for those still bordering on infancy. After having massacred thirty-five of the most aged women, they forced the dormitories of the others, whom they made the victims of their brutality, killing those who resisted, and carrying off with them in triumph young girls, from ten to fourteen years of age, the foul prey of debauchery saturated with blood.

"Whilst these proscriptions created consternation throughout Paris, the Assembly in vain sent commissaries to harangue the people at the doors of the prisons. The assassins would not even suspend their work to lend an ear to the official harangues. Vainly did the minister of the interior, Roland, groaning over his own impotency, write to Santerre to use force, in order to assure the safety of the prisons. It was three days before Santerre appeared to demand of the council-general of the Commune authority to repress the bloodhounds, now become dangerous to those who had let them loose on their enemies. The ruffians, reeking in gore, came insolently to claim of the municipal authorities payment for their murders. Tallien and his colleagues dared not refuse the price of these days' work, and entered on the registers of the Commune of Paris these salaries, scarcely concealed under the most evident titles and pretexts. Santerre and his detachments had the utmost difficulty in driving back to their foul dens these hordes, greedy for carnage, men who, living on crime for seven days, drinking quantities of wine mingled with

gunpowder, intoxicated with the fumes of blood; had become excited to such a pitch of physical insanity, that they were unable to take repose. The fever of extermination wholly absorbed them. Some of them, marked down with disgust by their neighbours, left their abodes and enrolled as volunteers, or, insatiable for crime, joined bands of assassins going to Orleans, Lyons, Meaux, Rheims, Versailles, to continue the proscriptions of Paris. Amongst these were Charlot, Grizon, Hamin, the weaver Rodi, Henriot, the journeyman butcher Alaigre, and a negro named Delorme, brought to Paris by Fournier l'Américain. This black, untiring in murder, killed with his own hands more than two hundred prisoners during the three days and three nights of this fearful slaughter, with no cessation beyond the brief space he allowed himself to recruit his strength with wine. His shirt fastened round his waist, leaving his trunk bare, his hideous features, his black skin red with splashes of blood, his bursts of savage laughter, displaying his large white teeth at every death-blow he dealt, made this man the symbol of murder and the avenger his race. It was one blood exhausting another; extermination punishing the European for his attempts on Africa. This negro, who was invariably seen with a head recently cut off in his hand, during all the popular convulsions of the Revolution, was two years afterwards arrested during the days of Prairial, carrying at the end of a pike the head of Féraud, the deputy, and died at last the death he had so frequently inflicted upon others.

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"Such were the days of September. The ditches of Clamart, the catacombs of the Barrière St. Jacques, alone knew the number of the victims. Some said ten thousand, others only two or three thousand." Vol. 11. pp. 139–141.

Among the portraitures of character, none, perhaps, exceed in interest those of Robespierre and Louis Philippe. The former is particularly curious, as showing what reversed decisions history is sometimes called upon to give ; and the latter from the strange contrast between the early career of Louis Philippe, and the influence he is now exerting upon the institutions of Europe.

"The life of Robespierre bore witness to the disinterestedness of his ideas his life was the most eloquent of his speeches; and if his master, Jean Jacques Rousseau, had quitted his cottage of the Chaumettes or Ernonville to become the legislator of humanity, he could not have led a more retired or more simple existence; and this poverty was the more meritorious as it was voluntary. Every day the object of attempts at corruption from the Court, the party of Mirabeau, the Lameths, and the Girond

ists, during the two Assemblies, he had fortune within his reach, and disdained to open his hand; summoned by the election to fill the post of public accuser and judge at Paris, he had resigned and refused every thing to live in honest and proud indigence. All his fortune, and that of his brother and sister, consisted in a few small farms in Artois; the farmers of which, related to his family, and very poor, paid their rents but irregularly. His salary as deputy, during the Constituent Assembly and the Convention, supported three persons, and he was sometimes forced to borrow from his landlord or his friends. His debts, which, after six years' residence in Paris, only amounted to 4000 francs (160) at his death, attest his frugality.

"His life was that of an honest artisan; he lodged in the Rue St. Honoré, at the house now No. 396, opposite the Church of the Assumption. This house, low, and in a court, surrounded by sheds filled with timber and plants, had an almost rustic appear. ance. It consisted of a parlour opening on to the court, and communicating with a salon that looked into a small garden. From this salon a door led into a small study in which was a piano. There was a winding staircase to the first floor, on which the master of the house lived, and thence to the apartment of Robespierre.

"This house belonged to a cabinet-maker, named Duplay...... "Love also attached his heart, where toil, poverty, and retirement had fixed his life. Eléonore Duplay, the eldest daughter of his host, inspired Robespierre with a more serious attachment than her sisters. This feeling, rather predilection than passion, was more reasonable on the part of Robespierre, more ardent and simple on the part of the young girl. This affection afforded him tenderness without torment, happiness without distraction; it was the love that filled a man plunged all day in the agitation of public life repose of the heart after mental weariness. 'A noble soul,' said Robespierre of her; she would know equally how to die as how to love.' She had been surnamed Cornelia. This mutual affection, approved of by the family, commanded universal respect from its purity. They lived in the same house as betrothed, not as lovers. Robespierre had demanded the young girl's hand from her parents, and they had promised it to him.

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"The total want of fortune, and the uncertainty of the morrow, prevented him from marrying her until the destiny of France was determined on,' he said; but he only awaited the moment when the Revolution should be determined and wholly concluded, in order to retire from the turmoil and strife, and marry her whom he loved, retiring to live in Artois, in one of

"The Duc de Chartres had been welcomed by the old soldiers as a prince, by the new ones as a patriot, by all as a comrade. His intrepidity did not carry him away; he controlled it, and it left him that quickness of perception and that coolness so essential to a general; amidst the hottest fire he neither quickened nor slackened his pace, for his ardor was as much the effect of reflection as of calculation, and as grave as duty. His stature was lofty, his frame well knit, his appearance serious and thoughtful. The elevation of his brow, the blue hue of his eyes, the oval face, and the majestic, though somewhat heavy, outline of his chin, reminded every one strongly of the Bourbon family. The bend of his neck, the modest carriage, the mouth slightly drawn down at each corner, the penetrating glance, the winning smile, and the ready repartee, gained him the attention of the people. His familiarity martial with the officers, soldierly with the soldiers, patriotic with the citizens caused them to forgive him for being a prince. But beneath the exterior of a soldier of the people lurked the arrière pensée of a prince of the blood; and he plunged into all the events of the Revolution with the entire yet skilful abandon of a master mind; and it seemed as though he knew beforehand that events dash to pieces those who resist them, but that revolutions, like the ocean's waves, often restore men to the spot whence they tore them. To perform that skilfully which the exigency of the moment required, and to trust to the future and his birth for the rest, was the whole of his policy, and Machiavel could not have counselled him more skilfully than his own nature. His star never lighted him but a few steps in advance, and he neither wished nor asked of it more lustre, for his only ambition was to learn to wait. Time was his providence; and he was born to disappear in the great convulsions of his country, to survive crises, outwit the already wearied parties, satisfy and arrest revolution. Men feared, in spite of his bravery and his exalted enthusiasm for his country, to catch a glimpse of a throne raised upon its own ruins and by the hands of a republic. This presentiment, which invariably precedes great names and destinies, seemed to reveal to the army that of all the leaders of the Revolution, he might one day be the most useful or the most fatal to liberty.” — Vol. 11. pp. 159 – 161.

In connection with the last extract, the following passage is of curious interest.

"About this time the Duc de Chartres (since King of the French) presented himself at the audience of the minister of war, Servan, to complain of some injustice that had been shown him. Servan, unwell and in bed, listened carelessly to the complaints

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