--All, therefore, that can be obtained is, a promise to have us removed
to Amiens in a short time; and I understand the detenus are there treated
with consideration, and that no tribunal revolutionnaire has yet been
established.
My mind will be considerably more at ease if this removal can be
effected. Perhaps we may not be in more real danger here than at any
other place, but it is not realities that constitute the misery of life;
and situated as we are, that imagination must be phlegmatic indeed, which
does not create and exaggerate enough to prevent the possibility of
ease.--We are, as I before observed, placed as it were within the
jurisdiction of the guillotine; and I have learned "a secret of our
prison-house" to-day which Mad. de ____ had hitherto concealed from me,
and which has rendered me still more anxious to quit it. Several of our
fellow prisoners, whom I supposed only transferred to other houses, have
been taken away to undergo the ceremony of a trial, and from thence to
the scaffold. These judicial massacres are now become common, and the
repetition of them has destroyed at once the feeling of humanity and the
sense of justice. Familiarized to executions, the thoughtless and
sanguinary people behold with equal indifference the guilty or innocent
victim; and the Guillotine has not only ceased to be an object of horror,
but is become almost a source of amusement.
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