* The detail of the horrors committed in La Vendee and at Nantes were not at this time fully known.  Carrier had, however, acknowledged, in a report read to the Convention, that a boat-load of refractory priests had been drowned, and children of twelve years old condemned by a military commission!  One Fabre Marat, a republican General, wrote, about the same period, I think from Angers, that the Guillotine was too slow, and powder scarce, so that it was concluded more expedient to drown the rebels, which he calls a patriotic baptism!—­The following is a copy of a letter addressed to the Mayor of Paris by a Commissary of the Government: 

“You will give us pleasure by transmitting the details of your fete at Paris last decade, with the hymns that were sung.  Here we all cried "Vive la Republique!" as we ever do, when our holy mother Guillotine is at work.  Within these three days she has shaved eleven priests, one ci-devant noble, a nun, a general, and a superb Englishman, six feet high, and as he was too tall by a head, we have put that into the sack!  At the same time eight hundred rebels were shot at the Pont du Ce, and their carcases thrown into the Loire!—­I understand the army is on the track of the runaways.  All we overtake we shoot on the spot, and in such numbers that the ways are heaped with them!”

—­At Lyons, it is revolutionary to chain three hundred victims together before the mouths of loaded cannon, and massacre those who escape the discharge with clubs and bayonets;* and at Paris, revolutionary juries guillotine all who come before them.—­**

* The Convention formally voted their approbation of this measure, and Collot d’Herbois, in a report on the subject, makes a kind of apostrophical panegyric on the humanity of his colleagues.  “Which of you, Citizens, (says he,) would not have fired the cannon?  Which of you would not joyfully have destroyed all these traitors at a blow?”

     ** About this time a woman who sold newspapers, and the printer of
     them, were guillotined for paragraphs deemed incivique.

—­Yet this government is not more terrible than it is minutely vexations.  One’s property is as little secure as one’s existence.  Revolutionary committees every where sequestrate in the gross, in order to plunder in detail.*

* The revolutionary committees, when they arrested any one, pretended to affix seals in form.  The seal was often, however, no other than the private one of some individual employed—­sometimes only a button or a halfpenny, which was broken as often as the Committee wanted access to the wine or other effects.  Camille Desmoulins, in an address to Freron, his fellow-deputy, describes with some humour the mode of proceeding of these revolutionary pilferers: 

"Avant hier, deux Commissaires de la section de Mutius Scaevola, montent chez lui—­ils trouvent