Here we all cried
_"Vive la Republique!"_ as we ever do, when our holy mother Guillotine
is at work. Within these three days she has shaved eleven priests, one
_ci-devant_ noble, a nun, a general, and a superb Englishman, six feet
high, and as he was too tall by a head, we have put that into the sack!
At the same time eight hundred rebels were shot at the Pont du Ce, and
their carcases thrown into the Loire!--I understand the army is on the
track of the runaways. All we overtake we shoot on the spot, and in
such numbers that the ways are heaped with them!"
--At Lyons, it is revolutionary to chain three hundred victims together
before the mouths of loaded cannon, and massacre those who escape the
discharge with clubs and bayonets;* and at Paris, revolutionary juries
guillotine all who come before them.--**
* The Convention formally voted their approbation of this measure,
and Collot d'Herbois, in a report on the subject, makes a kind of
apostrophical panegyric on the humanity of his colleagues. "Which
of you, Citizens, (says he,) would not have fired the cannon? Which
of you would not joyfully have destroyed all these traitors at a
blow?"
** About this time a woman who sold newspapers, and the printer of
them, were guillotined for paragraphs deemed incivique.
--Yet this government is not more terrible than it is minutely vexations.
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