ith the abominable butchery of the Glaciere. On the
5th of November, at Caen, there are eighty-two gentlemen, townsmen and
artisans, knocked down and dragged to prison, for having offered their
services to the municipality as special constables. On the 14th of
November, at Montpellier, the roughs triumph; eight men and women are
killed in the streets or in their houses, and all conservatives are
disarmed or put to flight. By the end of October, it is a gigantic
column of smoke and flame shooting upward suddenly from week to week and
spreading everywhere, growing, on the other side of the Atlantic, into
civil war in St. Domingo, where wild beasts are let loose against their
keepers; 50,000 blacks take the field, and, at the outset, 1,000 whites
are assassinated, 15,000 Negroes slain, 200 sugar-mills destroyed and
damage done to the amount of 600,000,000; "a colony of itself alone
worth ten provinces, is almost annihilated."[2305] At Paris, Condorcet
is busy writing in his journal that "this news is not reliable, there
being no object in it but to create a French empire beyond the seas for
the King, where there will be masters and slaves." A corporal of the
Paris National Guard, on his own authority, orders the King to remain
indoors, fearing that he may escape, and forbids a sentinel to let
him go out after nine o'clock in the evening;[2306] at the Tuileries,
stump-speakers in the open air denounce aristocrats and priests; at
the Palais-Royal, there is a pandemonium of public lust and incendiary
speeches.[2307] There are centers of riot in all quarters, "as many
robberies as there are quarter-hours, and no robbers punished; no
police; overcrowded courts; more delinquents than there are prisons
to hold them; nearly all the private mansions closed; the annual
consumption in the faubourg St. Germain alone diminished by 250
millions; 20,000 thieves, with branded backs, idling away time in houses
of bad repute, at the theaters, in the Palais-Royal, at the National
Assembly, and in the coffee-houses; thousands of beggars infesting
the streets, crossways, and public squares. Everywhere an image of the
deepest poverty which is not calling for one's pity as it is accompanied
with insolence. Swarms of tattered vendors are offering all sorts of
paper-money, issued by anybody that chose to put it in circulation,
cut up into bits, sold, given, and coming back in rags, fouler than the
miserable creatures who deal in it."[2308] Out of 70