here the inhabitants desired to
show themselves equal to all the heights of the revolution. The churches
were, in most districts of France, closed against priests and
worshippers--the bells were broken and cast into cannon--the whole
ecclesiastical establishment destroyed--and the republican inscription
over the cemeteries, declaring death to be perpetual sleep, announced to
those who lived under that dominion, that they were to hope no redress
even in the next world.

Intimately connected with these laws affecting religion, was that which
reduced the union of marriage, the most sacred engagement which human
beings can form, and the permanence of which leads most strongly to the
consolidation of society, to the state of a mere civil contract of a
transitory character, which any two persons might engage in, and cast
loose at pleasure, when their taste was changed, or their appetite
gratified. If fiends had set themselves to work, to discover a mode of
most effectually destroying whatever is venerable, graceful, or
permanent in domestic life, and of obtaining at the same time an
assurance that the mischief which it was their object to create should
be perpetuated from one generation to another, they could not have
invented a more effectual plan than the degradation of marriage into a
state of mere occasional co-habitation, or licensed concubinage. Sophie
Arnoult, an actress famous for the witty things she said, described the
republican marriage as the sacrament of adultery.

_Fall of Danton, Robespierre, Marat and other Jacobins._

These monsters fell victims by the same means they had used for the
destruction of others. Marat was poignarded in 1793, by Charlotte
Corday, a young female, who had cherished in a feeling between lunacy
and heroism, the ambition of ridding the world of a tyrant. Danton was
guillotined in 1794. Robespierre followed soon after. His fall is thus
described by Scott in his life of Napoleon.

At length his fate urged him on to the encounter. Robespierre descended
to the convention, where he had of late but rarely appeared, like the
far nobler dictator of Rome; and in his case also, a band of senators
was ready to poignard the tyrant on the spot, had they not been afraid
of the popularity he was supposed to enjoy, and which they feared might
render them instant victims to the revenge of the Jacobins. The speech
which Robespierre addressed to the convention was as menacing as the
first distant r