os, the
hydras after the Deluge; as the vultures and crows follow the carnage.

Here was the spectre of iron impassible, implacable, inflexible, which
men call Retaliation; and this spectre mingled with the guests. It
entered the gilded salons; it signalled with a look, a gesture, a nod,
and men followed where it led. It was, as says the author from whom we
have borrowed these hitherto unknown but authentic details, "a merry
lust for extermination."

The Terror had affected great cynicism in clothes, a Spartan austerity
in its food, the profound contempt of a barbarous people for arts and
enjoyments. The Thermidorian reaction was, on the contrary, elegant,
opulent, adorned; it exhausted all luxuries, all voluptuous pleasures,
as in the days of Louis XV.; with one addition, the luxury of vengeance,
the lust of blood.

Freron's name was given to the youth of the day, which was called the
jeunesse Freron, or the _jeunesse doree_ (gilded youth). Why Freron? Why
should he rather than others receive that strange and fatal honor?

I cannot tell you--my researches (those who know me will do me the
justice to admit that when I have an end in view, I do not count
them)--my researches have not discovered an answer. It was a whim of
Fashion, and Fashion is the one goddess more capricious than Fortune.

Our readers will hardly know to-day who Freron was. The Freron who was
Voltaire's assailant was better known than he who was the patron of
these elegant assassins; one was the son of the other. Louis Stanislas
was son of Elie-Catherine. The father died of rage when Miromesnil,
Keeper of the Seals, suppressed his journal. The other, irritated by
the injustices of which his father had been the victim, had at first
ardently embraced the revolutionary doctrines. Instead of the "Annee
Litteraire," strangled to death in 1775, he created the "Orateur du
Peuple," in 1789. He was sent to the Midi on a special mission, and
Marseilles and Toulon retain to this day the memory of his cruelty.
But all was forgotten when, on the 9th Thermidor, he proclaimed himself
against Robespierre, and assisted in casting from the altar the Supreme
Being, the colossus who, being an apostle, had made himself a god.
Freron, repudiated by the Mountain, which abandoned him to the heavy
jaws of Moise Bayle; Freron, disdainfully repulsed by the Girondins,
who delivered him over to the imprecations of Isnard; Freron, as the
terrible and picturesque orator of the