ut so were not the 'men of
the 10th of August,' They got their pay of course, but they wanted more
blood. At 9 A.M. the next morning they seized the venerable cure of
St.-Jean, the Abbe Paquot, and dragged him before Couplet, insisting
that he should take the constitutional oath. Couplet tried to explain
that the time for taking it had expired on August 26. But the courageous
Abbe, looking his assassins in the face, said to them: 'I will not take
it, it is against my conscience. If I had two souls I would gladly give
one of them for you. I have but one, and it belongs to my God.' He had
hardly uttered the words when he was struck down and cut to pieces.
Almost at the same moment another priest more than eighty years of age,
the curate of Rilly, refusing to take the oath, was hanged upon the bar
of a street lantern before the eyes of the Mayor of Reims, who tried in
vain to disperse or control these _sans-culottes_, who, according to Mr.
Carlyle, 'howled and bellowed, but did not bite.'

By this time the news came of the surrender of Verdun to the Prussians,
and the tocsin began to sound from the great bells of the cathedral. The
citizens of Reims suddenly took courage from the sense of the national
peril, not to fall upon and slay helpless and unarmed prisoners, but to
make head against the murderers and scoundrels who were domineering over
their city. The local National Guards began to appear, and were shortly
reinforced by a column of Volunteers from the country armed to meet the
invaders. The Mayor took command of them and marched to the Hotel de
Ville. There they found that one Chateau, an agent of Couplet, had been
secretly denounced by his employer as a spy and promptly hanged by the
Parisians on the same lantern-bar from which the night before they had
hanged the aged cure of Rilly. His dead body had been flung into the
still blazing bonfire kept up all night with woodwork from the pillaged
churches of Reims. The champions of 'moral unity' had also laid hands on
the wife of this wretched man, and were on the point of throwing her
alive into the flames when the Mayor and the troops appeared. The order
to 'charge bayonets' was given and the whole brood of scoundrels
thereupon broke and fled in all directions.

All these details, with others too loathsome to be here reproduced, are,
as I have said, taken from an official _proces verbal_ drawn up at Reims
on September 8, 1792, and signed by every member of the Counci