t once."

This cry was heard, and by common consent the assassins stood aside.
They left the unfortunate man bleeding, disfigured, mangled, to taste of
his death agony.

This lasted five hours, during which, amid shouts of laughter, insults,
and jeers from the crowd, this poor body lay palpitating upon the steps
of the altar. That is how they kill at Avignon.

Stay! there is yet another way. A man of the French party conceived the
idea of going to the Mont-de-Piete for information. Everything was in
order there, not a fork or a spoon had been removed. It was therefore
not as an accomplice of theft that Lescuyer had just been so cruelly
murdered, it was for being a patriot.

There was at that time in Avignon a man who controlled the populace. All
these terrible leaders of the Midi have acquired such fatal celebrity
that it suffices to name them for every one, even the least educated,
to know them. This man was Jourdan. Braggart and liar, he had made the
common people believe that it was he who had cut off the head of the
governor of the Bastille. So they called him Jourdan, Coupe-tete.
That was not his real name, which was Mathieu Jouve. Neither was he a
Provencal; he came from Puy-en-Velay. He had formerly been a muleteer
on those rugged heights which surround his native town; then a soldier
without going to war--war had perhaps made him more human; after that
he had kept a drink-shop in Paris. In Avignon he had been a vendor of
madder.

He collected three hundred men, carried the gates of the town, left
half of his troop to guard them, and with the remainder marched upon
the Church of the Cordeliers, preceded by two pieces of cannon. These he
stationed in front of the church and fired them into it at random. The
assassins fled like a flock of frightened birds, leaving some few dead
upon the church steps. Jourdan and his men trampled over the bodies and
entered the holy precincts. No one was there but the Virgin, and the
wretched Lescuyer, still breathing. Jourdan and his comrades took good
care not to despatch Lescuyer; his death agony was a supreme means
of exciting the mob. They picked up this remnant of a sentient being,
three-quarters dead, and carried it along, bleeding, quivering, gasping,
with them.

Every one fled from the sight, closing doors and windows. At the end of
an hour, Jourdan and his three hundred men were masters of the town.

Lescuyer was dead, but what of that; they no longer needed his ag