it
were already done. See, for example, on the 17th of June, what a Batch,
Fifty-four at once! Swart Amiral is here, he of the pistol that missed
fire; young Cecile Renault, with her father, family, entire kith and
kin; the widow of d'Espremenil; old M. de Sombreuil of the Invalides,
with his Son,--poor old Sombreuil, seventy-three years old, his
Daughter saved him in September, and it was but for this. Faction of the
Stranger, fifty-four of them! In red shirts and smocks, as Assassins
and Faction of the Stranger, they flit along there; red baleful
Phantasmagory, towards the land of Phantoms.

Meanwhile will not the people of the Place de la Revolution, the
inhabitants along the Rue Saint-Honore, as these continual Tumbrils
pass, begin to look gloomy? Republicans too have bowels. The Guillotine
is shifted, then again shifted; finally set up at the remote extremity
of the South-East: (Montgaillard, iv. 237.) Suburbs Saint-Antoine and
Saint-Marceau it is to be hoped, if they have bowels, have very tough
ones.

Chapter 3.6.V.

The Prisons.

It is time now, however, to cast a glance into the Prisons. When
Desmoulins moved for his Committee of Mercy, these Twelve Houses of
Arrest held five thousand persons. Continually arriving since then,
there have now accumulated twelve thousand. They are Ci-devants,
Royalists; in far greater part, they are Republicans, of various
Girondin, Fayettish, Un-Jacobin colour. Perhaps no human Habitation or
Prison ever equalled in squalor, in noisome horror, these Twelve Houses
of Arrest. There exist records of personal experience in them Memoires
sur les Prisons; one of the strangest Chapters in the Biography of Man.

Very singular to look into it: how a kind of order rises up in all
conditions of human existence; and wherever two or three are gathered
together, there are formed modes of existing together, habitudes,
observances, nay gracefulnesses, joys! Citoyen Coitant will explain
fully how our lean dinner, of herbs and carrion, was consumed not
without politeness and place-aux-dames: how Seigneur and Shoeblack,
Duchess and Doll-Tearsheet, flung pellmell into a heap, ranked
themselves according to method: at what hour 'the Citoyennes took to
their needlework;' and we, yielding the chairs to them, endeavoured to
talk gallantly in a standing posture, or even to sing and harp more
or less. Jealousies, enmities are not wanting; nor flirtations, of an
effective character.

Alas, by