which no communication
could have subsisted.

--They were conducted to the scaffold in a sort of red frocks, intended,
as was alleged, to mark them as assassins--but, in reality, to prevent
the crowd from distinguishing or receiving any impression from the number
of young and interesting females who were comprised in this dreadful
slaughter.--They met death with a courage which seemed almost to
disappoint the malice of their tyrants, who, in an original excess of
barbarity, are said to have lamented that their power of inflicting could
not reach those mental faculties which enabled their victims to suffer
with fortitude.*

* Fouquier Tinville, public accuser of the Revolutionary Tribunal,
enraged at the courage with which his victims submitted to their
fate, had formed the design of having them bled previous to their
execution; hoping by this means to weaken their spirits, and that
they might, by a pusillanimous behaviour in their last moments,
appear less interesting to the people.

Such are the horrors now common to almost every part of France: the
prisons are daily thinned by the ravages of the executioner, and again
repeopled by inhabitants destined to the fate of their predecessors. A
gloomy reserve, and a sort of uncertain foreboding, have taken possession
of every body--no one ventures to communicate his thoughts, even to his
nearest friend--relations avoid each other--and the whole social system
seems on the point of being dissolved. Those who have yet preserved
their freedom take the longest circuit, rather than pass a republican
Bastille; or, if obliged by necessity to approach one, it is with
downcast or averted looks, which bespeak their dread of incurring the
suspicion of humanity.

I say little of my own feelings; they are not of a nature to be relieved
by pathetic expressions: "I am e'en sick at heart." For some time I have
struggled both against my own evils, and the share I take in the general
calamity, but my mortal part gives way, and I can no longer resist the
despondency which at times depresses me, and which indeed, more than the
danger attending it, has occasioned my abandoning my pen for the last
month.--Several circumstances have occurred within these few days, to add
to the uneasiness of our situation, and my own apprehensions. Le Bon,*
whose cruelties at Arras seem to have endeared him to his colleagues in
the Convention, has had his powers extended