ed out in great floods, vomie a grands flots' and Twelve
thousand Masons are requisitioned from the neighbouring country, to raze
Toulon from the face of the Earth. For it is to be razed, so reports
Barrere; all but the National Shipping Establishments; and to be
called henceforth not Toulon, but Port of the Mountain. There in black
death-cloud we must leave it;--hoping only that Toulon too is built of
stone; that perhaps even Twelve thousand Masons cannot pull it down,
till the fit pass.

One begins to be sick of 'death vomited in great floods.' Nevertheless
hearest thou not, O reader (for the sound reaches through centuries),
in the dead December and January nights, over Nantes Town,--confused
noises, as of musketry and tumult, as of rage and lamentation; mingling
with the everlasting moan of the Loire waters there? Nantes Town is
sunk in sleep; but Representant Carrier is not sleeping, the wool-capped
Company of Marat is not sleeping. Why unmoors that flatbottomed craft,
that gabarre; about eleven at night; with Ninety Priests under hatches?
They are going to Belle Isle? In the middle of the Loire stream, on
signal given, the gabarre is scuttled; she sinks with all her cargo.
'Sentence of Deportation,' writes Carrier, 'was executed vertically.'
The Ninety Priests, with their gabarre-coffin, lie deep! It is the
first of the Noyades, what we may call Drownages, of Carrier; which have
become famous forever.

Guillotining there was at Nantes, till the Headsman sank worn out: then
fusillading 'in the Plain of Saint-Mauve;' little children fusilladed,
and women with children at the breast; children and women, by the
hundred and twenty; and by the five hundred, so hot is La Vendee: till
the very Jacobins grew sick, and all but the Company of Marat cried,
Hold! Wherefore now we have got Noyading; and on the 24th night of
Frostarious year 2, which is 14th of December 1793, we have a second
Noyade: consisting of 'a Hundred and Thirty-eight persons.' (Deux Amis,
xii. 266-72; Moniteur, du 2 Janvier 1794.)

Or why waste a gabarre, sinking it with them? Fling them out; fling them
out, with their hands tied: pour a continual hail of lead over all the
space, till the last struggler of them be sunk! Unsound sleepers of
Nantes, and the Sea-Villages thereabouts, hear the musketry amid the
night-winds; wonder what the meaning of it is. And women were in that
gabarre; whom the Red Nightcaps were stripping naked; who begged, in
their a