e taking
of the Bastile, than it now ran against the tyranny of the Mountain.
From every dungeon the prisoners came forth as they had gone in, by
hundreds. The decree which forbade the soldiers of the Republic to give
quarter to the English was repealed by a unanimous vote, amidst loud
acclamations; nor passed as it was, disobeyed as it was, and rescinded
as it was, can it be with justice considered as a blemish on the fame of
the French nation. The Jacobin Club was refractory. It was suppressed
without resistance. The surviving Girondist deputies, who had concealed
themselves from the vengeance of their enemies in caverns and garrets,
were readmitted to their seats in the Convention. No day passed without
some signal reparation of injustice; no street in Paris was without some
trace of the recent change. In the theatre, the bust of Marat was pulled
down from its pedestal and broken in pieces, amidst the applause of the
audience. His carcase was ejected from the Pantheon. The celebrated
picture of his death, which had hung in the hall of the Convention, was
removed. The savage inscriptions with which the walls of the city had
been covered disappeared; and, in place of death and terror, humanity,
the watchword of the new rulers, was everywhere to be seen. In the
meantime, the gay spirit of France, recently subdued by oppression, and
now elated by the joy of a great deliverance, wantoned in a thousand
forms. Art, taste, luxury, revived. Female beauty regained its
empire,--an empire strengthened by the remembrance of all the tender and
all the sublime virtues which women delicately bred and reputed
frivolous had displayed during the evil days. Refined manners,
chivalrous sentiments, followed in the train of love. The dawn of the
Arctic summer day after the Arctic winter night, the great unsealing of
the waters, the awakening of animal and vegetable life, the sudden
softening of the air, the sudden blooming of the flowers, the sudden
bursting of old forests into verdure, is but a feeble type of that
happiest and most genial of revolutions, the revolution of the ninth of
Thermidor.

But, in the midst of the revival of all kind and generous sentiments,
there was one portion of the community against which mercy itself seemed
to cry out for vengeance. The chiefs of the late government and their
tools were now never named but as the men of blood, the drinkers of
blood, the cannibals. In some parts of France, where the creatures