d glorious life!"

Roland laughed in his usual nervous manner.

"Ah!" said he, "so this is the tourist, the superficial traveller,
the Wandering Jew of civilization, who pauses nowhere, gauges nothing,
judges everything by the sensation it produces in him. The tourist who,
without opening the doors of these abodes where dwell the fools we call
men, says: 'Behind these walls is happiness!' Well, my dear friend,
you see this charming river, don't you? These flowering meadows, these
pretty villages? It is the picture of peace, innocence and fraternity;
the cycle of Saturn, the golden age returned; it is Eden, Paradise!
Well, all that is peopled by beings who have flown at each other's
throats. The jungles of Calcutta, the sedges of Bengal are inhabited
by tigers and panthers not one whit more ferocious or cruel than the
denizens of these pretty villages, these dewy lawns, and these charming
shores. After lauding in funeral celebrations the good, the great, the
immortal Marat, whose body, thank God! they cast into the common sewer
like carrion that he was, and always had been; after performing these
funeral rites, to which each man brought an urn into which he shed
his tears, behold! our good Bressans, our gentle Bressans, these
poultry-fatteners, suddenly decided that the Republicans were all
murderers. So they murdered them by the tumbrelful to correct them of
that vile defect common to savage and civilized man--the killing his
kind. You doubt it? My dear fellow, on the road to Lons-le-Saulnier they
will show you, if you are curious, the spot where not six months ago
they organized a slaughter fit to turn the stomach of our most ferocious
troopers on the battlefield. Picture to yourself a tumbrel of prisoners
on their way to Lons-le-Saulnier. It was a staff-sided cart, one of
those immense wagons in which they take cattle to market. There were
some thirty men in this tumbrel, whose sole crime was foolish exaltation
of thought and threatening language. They were bound and gagged; heads
hanging, jolted by the bumping of the cart; their throats parched with
thirst, despair and terror; unfortunate beings who did not even have,
as in the times of Nero and Commodus, the fight in the arena, the
hand-to-hand struggle with death. Powerless, motionless, the lust of
massacre surprised them in their fetters, and battered them not only in
life but in death; their bodies, when their hearts had ceased to beat,
still resounded beneath t