it was witness; the odor of blood had driven away
the residents from the houses adjacent to the Place de la Revolution; a
new guillotine had been erected upon the Place du Trone. Upon the route
along which ran the fatal carts shops were closed, and passers-by
endeavored to avoid meeting the procession. A few rare loungers of the
lowest class alone walked in the gardens of the Tuileries and the
Champs-Elysees. All was silent, but pity was growing in the minds of
men. The distant sound of the horrors that were general throughout
France redoubled the terror of Paris.

The provincial sufferings were not uniform, and the fury of the
representative commissioners was unequally distributed. Either by a
happy chance, or it might be by an instinctive knowledge of the
character of the population, the revolutionary scaffold was never set up
in Lower Normandy; the Vendee, on the contrary, expiated its long
resistance in its blood, and Carrier filled with terror the city of
Nantes, always favorable to revolution. He had tried guillotine and
grape-shot, but both were too tardy in their action to suit his zeal. He
conceived the idea of crowding the condemned into ships with valves,
launched upon the Loire: the beautiful river saw these unfortunates
struggling in its waters. Henceforth the executioners tied the prisoners
together by one hand and one foot; these "Republican Marriages," as they
were called, insured the speedy death of the victims. The waters of the
Loire became infected; its shores were covered with corpses; the fishes
themselves could no longer serve as nourishment for human beings; fever
decimated the inhabitants of Nantes. The fury of Carrier bordered on
madness: he caused the little Vendean infants, collected by Breton
charity, to be cast into the water. "It is necessary," said he, "to slay
the wolves' cubs."

The same terror also, and the same atrocities which desolated the West,
reigned in the North and the South. In the Department of Vaucluse,
Maignet, in the Pas-de-Calais, Joseph Lebon, had obtained the erection
of local revolutionary tribunals. "The arrests which I have ordered in
the Departments of Vaucluse and the Bouches-du-Rhone amount to twelve
or fifteen thousand," wrote Maignet to his friend Couthon. "It would
require an army to conduct them to Paris; besides, it is necessary to
appal, and the blow is only terrifying when struck in the sight of those
who have lived with the guilty." They had felled the t