nd night.

Worse things still are in store. Famine is in Lyons, and ruin and fire.
Desperate are the sallies of the besieged; brave Precy, their National
Colonel and Commandant, doing what is in man: desperate but ineffectual.
Provisions cut off; nothing entering our city but shot and shell! The
Arsenal has roared aloft; the very Hospital will be battered down, and
the sick buried alive. A black Flag hung on this latter noble Edifice,
appealing to the pity of the besiegers; for though maddened, were they
not still our brethren? In their blind wrath, they took it for a flag of
defiance, and aimed thitherward the more. Bad is growing ever worse
here; and how will the worse stop, till it have grown worst of all?
Commissioner Dubois will listen to no pleading, to no speech, save this
only: "We surrender at discretion."

Lyons contains in it subdued Jacobins; dominant Girondins; secret
Royalists. And now, mere deaf madness and cannon-shot enveloping them,
will not the desperate Municipality fly, at last, into the arms of
Royalism itself? Majesty of Sardinia was to bring help, but it failed.
Emigrant D'Autichamp, in name of the Two Pretender-Royal-Highnesses, is
coming through Switzerland with help; coming, not yet come: Precy hoists
the Fleur-de-lis!

At sight of which all true Girondins sorrowfully fling down their arms.
Let our Tricolor brethren storm us then and slay us in their wrath; with
_you_ we conquer not. The famishing women and children are sent forth:
deaf Dubois sends them back--rains in more fire and madness. Our
"redoubts of cotton-bags" are taken, retaken; Precy under his
Fleur-de-lis is valiant as Despair. What will become of Lyons? It is a
siege of seventy days.

Or see, in these same weeks, far in the Western waters: breasting
through the Bay of Biscay, a greasy dingy little Merchant ship, with
Scotch skipper; under hatches whereof sit, disconsolate, the last
forlorn nucleus of Girondism, the Deputies from Quimper! Several have
dissipated themselves, whithersoever they could. Poor Riouffe fell into
the talons of Revolutionary Committee and Paris Prison. The rest sit
here under hatches; reverend Petion with his gray hair, angry Buzot,
suspicious Louvet, brave young Barbaroux, and others. They have escaped
from Quimper, in this sad craft; are now tacking and struggling; in
danger from the waves, in danger from the English, in still worse danger
from the French--banished by Heaven and Earth to the greasy