of laughter; the people stop to eat and drink on the
road, and oblige the guards to clink glasses with them; they shout and
fire salvos of musketry; men and women hold each other's hands and
sing and dance about in the mud.--Such is the new fraternity: a funeral
procession of legal and legitimate authorities, a triumph of brutality
over intelligence, a murderous and political Mardi-gras, a formidable
masquerade which, preceded by the insignia of death, drags along with it
the heads of France, the King, the ministers, and the deputies, that it
may constrain them to rule to until according to its frenzy, that it may
hold them under its them pikes until it is pleased to slaughter them.

VI.--The Government and the nation in the hands of the revolutionary
party.

This time there can be no mistake: the Reign of Terror is fully and
firmly established. On this very day the mob stops a vehicle, in which
it hopes to find M. de Virieu, and declares, on searching it, that "they
are looking for the deputy to massacre him, as well as others of whom
they have a list."[1445] Two days afterwards the Abbe Gregoire tells
the National Assembly that not a day passes without ecclesiastics being
insulted in Paris, and pursued with "horrible threats." Malouet is
advised that "as soon as guns are distributed among the militia, the
first use made of them will be to get rid of those deputies who are bad
citizens," and among others of the Abbe Maury. "The moment I stepped out
into the streets," writes Mounier, "I was publicly followed. It was a
crime to be seen in my company. Wherever I happened to go, along
with two or three of my companions, it was stated that an assembly of
aristocrats was forming. I had become such an object of terror that they
threatened to set fire to a country-house where I had passed twenty-four
hours; and, to relieve their minds, a promise had to be given that
neither myself nor my friends should be again received into it." In one
week five or six hundred deputies have their passports[1446] made out,
and hold themselves ready to depart. During the following month one
hundred and twenty give in their resignations, or no longer appear
in the Assembly. Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, the Bishop of Langres, and
others besides, quit Paris, and afterwards France. Mallet du Pan writes,
"Opinion now dictates its judgment with steel in hand. Believe or die is
the anathema which vehement spirits pronounce, and this in the name
of