te Amnesty do?
Oblivious Lethe flows not above ground! Papal Aristocrats and Patriot
Brigands are still an eye-sorrow to each other; suspected, suspicious,
in what they do and forbear. The august Constituent Assembly is gone but
a fortnight, when, on Sunday the Sixteenth morning of October 1791, the
unquenched combustion suddenly becomes luminous! For Anti-constitutional
Placards are up, and the Statue of the Virgin is said to have shed
tears, and grown red. (Proces-verbal de la Commune d'Avignon, &c. in
Hist. Parl. xii. 419-23.) Wherefore, on that morning, Patriot l'Escuyer,
one of our 'six leading Patriots,' having taken counsel with his
brethren and General Jourdan, determines on going to Church, in company
with a friend or two: not to hear mass, which he values little; but to
meet all the Papalists there in a body, nay to meet that same weeping
Virgin, for it is the Cordeliers Church; and give them a word of
admonition. Adventurous errand; which has the fatallest issue! What
L'Escuyer's word of admonition might be no History records; but the
answer to it was a shrieking howl from the Aristocrat Papal worshippers,
many of them women. A thousand-voiced shriek and menace; which as
L'Escuyer did not fly, became a thousand-handed hustle and jostle; a
thousand-footed kick, with tumblings and tramplings, with the pricking
of semstresses stilettos, scissors, and female pointed instruments.
Horrible to behold; the ancient Dead, and Petrarchan Laura, sleeping
round it there; (Ugo Foscolo, Essay on Petrarch, p. 35.) high Altar and
burning tapers looking down on it; the Virgin quite tearless, and of the
natural stone-colour!--L'Escuyer's friend or two rush off, like Job's
Messengers, for Jourdan and the National Force. But heavy Jourdan will
seize the Town-Gates first; does not run treble-fast, as he might:
on arriving at the Cordeliers Church, the Church is silent, vacant;
L'Escuyer, all alone, lies there, swimming in his blood, at the foot of
the high Altar; pricked with scissors; trodden, massacred;--gives one
dumb sob, and gasps out his miserable life for evermore.

Sight to stir the heart of any man; much more of many men, self-styled
Brigands of Avignon! The corpse of L'Escuyer, stretched on a bier,
the ghastly head girt with laurel, is borne through the streets; with
many-voiced unmelodious Nenia; funeral-wail still deeper than it is
loud! The copper-face of Jourdan, of bereft Patriotism, has grown black.
Patriot Municip