d:--

"Cousons, filons, cousons bien,
V'la des habits de notre fabrique
Pour l'hiver qui vient.
Soldats de la Patrie
Vous ne manquerez de rien."[170]

[Footnote 170: "Sew we, spin we, sew we well, behold the coats we have
made for the winter that is coming. Soldiers of the Fatherland, ye
shall want for nothing."]

The smiths chanted to the rhythm of their strokes:--

"Forgeons, forgeons, forgeons bien!"

On the new standards waving in the breeze ran the legend: "The French
people risen against Tyrants." Toulon was in the hands of the English;
Lyons in revolt. With enemies in her camp, with one arm tied by the
insurrection in La Vendee, the Revolution hurled her ragged and
despised _sans-culottes_,[171] against her enemies. How vain is the
wisdom of the great! Burke thought that the Revolution had expunged
France in a political sense out of the system of Europe, and his
opinion was shared by every European statesman; but before the year
closed, the proud and magnificently accoutred armies of kings were
scattered over the borders, civil war was crushed, the Revolution
triumphant. Soon the "dwarfish, ragged _sans-culottes_, the small
black-looking Marseillaises dressed in rags of every colour," whom
Goethe saw tramping out of Mayence "as if the goblin king had opened
his mountains and sent forth his lively host of dwarfs," had forced
Prussia, the arch-champion of monarchy, to make peace and leave its
Rhine provinces in the hands of regicides. Meanwhile terror reigned in
Paris. In the frenzy of mortal strife the Revolution struck out
blindly and cut down friend as well as foe; the innocent with the
guilty. At least the guillotine fell swiftly and mercifully. Gone were
the days of the wheel, the rack, the boiling lead and the stake. Under
the _ancien regime_ the torture of _accused_ persons was one of the
sights shown to foreigners in Paris. Evelyn, when visiting the city in
1651, was taken to see the torture of an _alleged_ thief in the
Chatelet, who was "wracked in an extraordinary manner, so that they
severed the fellow's joints in miserable sort." Failing to extort a
confession, "they increased the extension and torture, and then
placing a horne in his mouth, such as they drench horses with, poured
two buckets of water down, so that it prodigiously swelled him." There
was another "malefactor" to be dealt with, but the traveller had seen
enough, and he leaves, reflecting that it represented to hi