private soldiers made fifty thousand livres, and they have been seen
loaded with trinkets, and exercising the most abominable
prodigalities of every kind."
Lequinio, War of La Vendee.

"The conquerors of the Bastille had unluckily a most unbridled
ardour for pillage--one would have supposed they had come for the
express purpose of plunder, rather than fighting. The stage coaches
for Paris were entirely loaded with their booty."
Report of Benaben, Commissioner of the Department of Maine and
Loire.

--The carriages of the army were entirely appropriated to the conveyance
of their booty; till, at last, the administrators of some departments
were under the necessity of forbidding such incumbrances: but the
officers, with whom restrictions of this sort were unavailing, put all
the horses and waggons of the country in requisition for similar
purposes, while they relaxed themselves from the serious business of the
war, (which indeed was nearly confined to burning, plundering, and
massacring the defenceless inhabitants,) by a numerous retinue of
mistresses and musicians.

It is not surprizing that generals and troops of this description were
constantly defeated; and their reiterated disasters might probably have
first suggested the idea of totally exterminating a people it was found
so difficult to subdue, and so impracticable to conciliate.--On the first
of October 1793, Barrere, after inveighing against the excessive
population of La Vendee, which he termed "frightful," proposed to the
Convention to proclaim by a decree, that the war of La Vendee "should be
terminated" by the twentieth of the same month. The Convention, with
barbarous folly, obeyed; and the enlightened Parisians, accustomed to
think with contempt on the ignorance of the Vendeans, believed that a
war, which had baffled the efforts of government for so many months, was
to end on a precise day--which Barrere had fixed with as much assurance
as though he had only been ordering a fete.

But the Convention and the government understood this decree in a very
different sense from the good people of Paris. The war was, indeed, to
be ended; not by the usual mode of combating armies, but by a total
extinction of all the inhabitants of the country, both innocent and
guilty--and Merlin de Thionville, with other members, so perfectly
comprehended this detestable project, that they already began to devise
schemes for rep