those who
were present were the clothes of the victims of the scaffold. Thus, most
of the young girls, whose mothers and older sisters had fallen by
the hands of the executioner, wore the same costume their mothers and
sisters had worn for that last lugubrious ceremony; that is to say, a
white gown and red shawl, with their hair cut short at the nape of the
neck. Some added to this costume, already so characteristic, a detail
that was even more significant; they knotted around their necks a thread
of scarlet silk, fine as the blade of a razor, which, as in Faust's
Marguerite, at the Witches' Sabbath, indicated the cut of the knife
between the throat and the collar bone.

As for the men who were in the same case, they wore the collars of their
coats turned down behind, those of their shirt wide open, their necks
bare, and their hair, cut short.

But many had other rights of entrance to this ball besides that of
having Victims in their families; some had made victims themselves.
These latter were increasing. There were present men of forty or
forty-five years of age, who had been trained in the boudoirs of the
beautiful courtesans of the seventeenth century--who had known Madame du
Barry in the attics of Versailles, Sophie Arnoult with M. de Lauraguais,
La Duthe with the Comte d'Artois--who had borrowed from the courtesies
of vice the polish with which they covered their ferocity. They were
still young and handsome; they entered a salon, tossing their perfumed
locks and their scented handkerchiefs; nor was it a useless precaution,
for if the odor of musk or verbena had not masked it they would have
smelled of blood.

There were men there twenty-five or thirty years old, dressed with
extreme elegance, members of the association of Avengers, who seemed
possessed with the mania of assassination, the lust of slaughter, the
frenzy of blood, which no blood could quench--men who, when the order
came to kill, killed all, friends or enemies; men who carried their
business methods into the business of murder, giving their bloody checks
for the heads of such or such Jacobins, and paying on sight.

There were younger men, eighteen and twenty, almost children, but
children fed, like Achilles, on the marrow of wild beasts, like Pyrrhus,
on the flesh of bears; here were the pupil-bandits of Schiller, the
apprentice-judges of the Sainte-Vehme--that strange generation that
follows great political convulsions, like the Titans after cha