d or dry-eyed, they mount, and
are away. This night to the Conciergerie; through the Palais misnamed of
Justice, to the Guillotine to-morrow.

Recklessness, defiant levity, the Stoicism if not of strength yet of
weakness, has possessed all hearts. Weak women and Ci-devants, their
locks not yet made into blond perukes, their skins not yet tanned into
breeches, are accustomed to 'act the Guillotine' by way of pastime. In
fantastic mummery, with towel-turbans, blanket-ermine, a mock Sanhedrim
of Judges sits, a mock Tinville pleads; a culprit is doomed, is
guillotined by the oversetting of two chairs. Sometimes we carry it
farther: Tinville himself, in his turn, is doomed, and not to the
Guillotine alone. With blackened face, hirsute, horned, a shaggy Satan
snatches him not unshrieking; shews him, with outstretched arm and
voice, the fire that is not quenched, the worm that dies not; the
monotony of Hell-pain, and the What hour? answered by, It is Eternity!
(Montgaillard, iv. 218; Riouffe, p. 273.)

And still the Prisons fill fuller, and still the Guillotine goes faster.
On all high roads march flights of Prisoners, wending towards Paris.
Not Ci-devants now; they, the noisy of them, are mown down; it is
Republicans now. Chained two and two they march; in exasperated moments,
singing their Marseillaise. A hundred and thirty-two men of Nantes for
instance, march towards Paris, in these same days: Republicans, or
say even Jacobins to the marrow of the bone; but Jacobins who had not
approved Noyading. (Voyage de Cent Trente-deux Nantais, Prisons, ii.
288-335.) Vive la Republique rises from them in all streets of towns:
they rest by night, in unutterable noisome dens, crowded to choking; one
or two dead on the morrow. They are wayworn, weary of heart; can only
shout: Live the Republic; we, as under horrid enchantment, dying in this
way for it!

Some Four Hundred Priests, of whom also there is record, ride at anchor,
'in the roads of the Isle of Aix,' long months; looking out on misery,
vacuity, waste Sands of Oleron and the ever-moaning brine. Ragged,
sordid, hungry; wasted to shadows: eating their unclean ration on deck,
circularly, in parties of a dozen, with finger and thumb; beating their
scandalous clothes between two stones; choked in horrible miasmata,
closed under hatches, seventy of them in a berth, through night; so that
the 'aged Priest is found lying dead in the morning, in the attitude of
prayer!' (Relation de ce