a promise to have us removed
to Amiens in a short time; and I understand the detenus are there treated
with consideration, and that no tribunal revolutionnaire has yet been
established.

My mind will be considerably more at ease if this removal can be
effected. Perhaps we may not be in more real danger here than at any
other place, but it is not realities that constitute the misery of life;
and situated as we are, that imagination must be phlegmatic indeed, which
does not create and exaggerate enough to prevent the possibility of
ease.--We are, as I before observed, placed as it were within the
jurisdiction of the guillotine; and I have learned "a secret of our
prison-house" to-day which Mad. de ____ had hitherto concealed from me,
and which has rendered me still more anxious to quit it. Several of our
fellow prisoners, whom I supposed only transferred to other houses, have
been taken away to undergo the ceremony of a trial, and from thence to
the scaffold. These judicial massacres are now become common, and the
repetition of them has destroyed at once the feeling of humanity and the
sense of justice. Familiarized to executions, the thoughtless and
sanguinary people behold with equal indifference the guilty or innocent
victim; and the Guillotine has not only ceased to be an object of horror,
but is become almost a source of amusement.

* At Arras this horrid instrument of death was what they called en
permanence, (stationary,) and so little regard was paid to the
morals of the people, (I say the morals, because every thing which
tends to destroy their humanity renders them vicious,) that it was
often left from one execution to another with the ensanguined traces
of the last victim but too evident.--Children were taught to amuse
themselves by making models of the Guillotine, with which they
destroyed flies, and even animals. On the Pontneuf, at Paris, a
sort of puppet-show was exhibited daily, whose boast it was to give
a very exact imitation of a guillotinage; and the burthen of a
popular song current for some months was _"Dansons la Guillotine."_
--On the 21st of January, 1794, the anniversary of the King's death,
the Convention were invited to celebrate it on the "Place de la
Revolution," where, during the ceremony, and in presence of the
whole legislative body, several people were executed. It is true,
Bourdon, one of the Deputies