. They are, as Camille Desmoulins has said, Jacobins of the
Jacobins. The chiefs are Danton, Marat, Hebert, Chaumette. They take
their names from those religious democrats, the Minorite friars of
Saint Francis, who wear a girdle of rope over their coarse gray habit.
They meet in the Place of the School of Medicine, in a monastery whose
church was built in the reign of Saint Louis, in 1259, with the fine
paid as indemnity for a murder. In 1590, it became the resort of the
most famous Leaguers. Chateaubriand says: "There are places which seem
to be the laboratory of seditions." How well this expression of the
author of the _Memoires d'Outre-tombe_ describes the club-room of the
Cordeliers! The pictures, the sculptured or painted images, the veils
and curtains of the convent, have been torn down. The basilica
displays nothing but its bare bones to the eyes of the spectator. At
the apse, where wind and rain enter through the unglazed rose-window,
joiners' work-benches serve as a desk for the president and as places
on which to deposit the red caps. Do you see the fallen beams, the
wooden benches, the dismantled stalls, the relics of saints pushed or
rolled against the walls {8} to serve as benches for "dirty, dusty,
drunken, sweaty spectators in torn jackets, pikes on their shoulders,
or with their bare arms crossed"? Do you hear the orators who "call
each other beggars, pickpockets, robbers, assassins, to the discordant
noise of hisses and those proper to their different groups of devils?
They find the material of their metaphors in murder, they borrow them
from the filthiest of sewers and dungheaps, and from places set apart
for the prostitution of men and women. Gestures render their figures
of speech more comprehensible; with the cynicism of dogs, they call
everything by its own name, in an impious and obscene parade of oaths
and curses. To destroy and to produce, death and generation, nothing
else can be disentangled from the savage jargon which deafens one's
ear." And what is it that interrupts the speakers? "The little black
owls of the cloister without monks and the steeple without bells,
making themselves merry in the broken windows in expectation of their
prey. At first they are called to order by the tinkling of an
ineffectual bell; but as their cries do not cease, they are shot at to
make them keep silence. They fall, palpitating, bleeding, and ominous,
into the midst of the pandemonium."

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