One begins to be sick of ‘death vomited in great floods.’  Nevertheless hearest thou not, O reader (for the sound reaches through centuries), in the dead December and January nights, over Nantes Town,—­confused noises, as of musketry and tumult, as of rage and lamentation; mingling with the everlasting moan of the Loire waters there?  Nantes Town is sunk in sleep; but Representant Carrier is not sleeping, the wool-capped Company of Marat is not sleeping.  Why unmoors that flatbottomed craft, that gabarre; about eleven at night; with Ninety Priests under hatches?  They are going to Belle Isle?  In the middle of the Loire stream, on signal given, the gabarre is scuttled; she sinks with all her cargo.  ‘Sentence of Deportation,’ writes Carrier, ‘was executed vertically.’  The Ninety Priests, with their gabarre-coffin, lie deep!  It is the first of the Noyades, what we may call Drownages, of Carrier; which have become famous forever.

Guillotining there was at Nantes, till the Headsman sank worn out:  then fusillading ‘in the Plain of Saint-Mauve;’ little children fusilladed, and women with children at the breast; children and women, by the hundred and twenty; and by the five hundred, so hot is La Vendee:  till the very Jacobins grew sick, and all but the Company of Marat cried, Hold!  Wherefore now we have got Noyading; and on the 24th night of Frostarious year 2, which is 14th of December 1793, we have a second Noyade:  consisting of ‘a Hundred and Thirty-eight persons.’ (Deux Amis, xii. 266-72; Moniteur, du 2 Janvier 1794.)

Or why waste a gabarre, sinking it with them?  Fling them out; fling them out, with their hands tied:  pour a continual hail of lead over all the space, till the last struggler of them be sunk!  Unsound sleepers of Nantes, and the Sea-Villages thereabouts, hear the musketry amid the night-winds; wonder what the meaning of it is.  And women were in that gabarre; whom the Red Nightcaps were stripping naked; who begged, in their agony, that their smocks might not be stript from them.  And young children were thrown in, their mothers vainly pleading:  “Wolflings,” answered the Company of Marat, “who would grow to be wolves.”

By degrees, daylight itself witnesses Noyades:  women and men are tied together, feet and feet, hands and hands:  and flung in:  this they call Mariage Republicain, Republican Marriage.  Cruel is the panther of the woods, the she-bear bereaved of her whelps:  but there is in man a hatred crueller than that.  Dumb, out of suffering now, as pale swoln corpses, the victims tumble confusedly seaward along the Loire stream; the tide rolling them back:  clouds of ravens darken the River; wolves prowl on the shoal-places:  Carrier writes, ’Quel torrent revolutionnaire, What a torrent of Revolution!’ For the man is rabid; and the Time is rabid.  These are the Noyades of Carrier; twenty-five by the tale, for what is done in darkness comes to be investigated in sunlight:  (Proces de Carrier, 4 tomes, Paris, 1795.) not to be forgotten for centuries,—­We will turn to another aspect of the Consummation of Sansculottism; leaving this as the blackest.