Mountain, rested almost entirely on that chosen band of adherents whose emissaries ruled with absolute sway the municipality and the departments.

Seven thousand prisoners were soon accumulated in the different places of confinement in Paris; the number throughout France exceeded two hundred thousand. The condition of such a multitude of captives was necessarily miserable in the extreme; the prisons of the Conciergerie, of the Force and the Mairie, were more horrible than any in Europe. All the comforts which during the first months of the Reign of Terror were allowed to the captives of fortune were withdrawn. Such luxuries, it was said, were an insupportable indulgence to the rich aristocrats while without the prison walls the poor were starving for want. In consequence, they established refectories, where the whole prisoners, of whatever rank or sex, were allowed only the coarsest and most unwholesome fare. None were permitted to purchase better provisions for themselves, and to prevent the possibility of their doing so a rigorous search was made for money of every description, which was all taken from the captives. Some were even denied the sad consolation of bearing their misfortunes together, and to the terrors of solitary confinement were added those of death, which daily became more urgent and inevitable. Not content with the real terrors which they presented, the ingenuity of the jailers was exerted to produce imaginary anxiety: the long nights were frequently interrupted by visits from the executioners, solely intended to excite alarm; the few hours of sleep allowed to the victims were broken by the rattling of

chains and unbarring of doors, to induce the belief that their fellow-prisoners were about to be led to the scaffold; and the warrants for death against eighty prisoners were made the, means of keeping six hundred in agony.

Dissatisfied with the progress of the executions, the Revolutionary Tribunal fell upon an extraordinary expedient to accelerate them. By the prospect of amnesty to themselves they prevailed on some of the basest of the captives to announce a project for escape in the prisons. "We must have a conspiracy," said Fouquier Tinville, "in the prisons. Its chiefs are already named; choose their companions: we must have sixty or a hundred." The victims whom the traitors selected were those whose rank or fortune was most likely to render them acceptable to the committee; their names were announced aloud in the prisons, and they were led out next morning to execution.

Despair of life, recklessness of the future, produced their usual effects on the unhappy crowd of captives. Some sunk into sullen indifference; others indulged in immoderate gayety and sought to amuse life even to the foot of the scaffold. The day before his execution the poet Ducorneau composed a beautiful ode, which was sung in chorus by the whole prisoners, and repeated, with a slight variation, after his execution. At other times the scene changed in the midst of their ravings the prisoners first destined for the scaffold were transported by the Phedon of Plato and the death of Socrates; infidelity in its last moments betook itself with delight to the sublime belief of the immortality of the soul. The affections, continually called forth, flowed with uncommon warmth; their mutual fate excited among the prisoners

:

the strongest feelings of commiseration, and nothing astonished the few who escaped from confinement so much as the want of sympathy for the sufferings of mankind which generally prevailed in the world.

From the farthest extremities of France crowds of prisoners daily arrived at the gates of the Conciergerie, which successively sent forth its band of victims to the scaffold. Gray hairs and youthful forms, countenances blooming with health and faces worn with suffering, beauty and talent, rank and virtue, were indiscriminately rolled together to the fatal doors. With truth might have been written over their portals what Dante placed over the entrance of the infernal regions:

'All ye who enter here, leave Hope behind." Sixty persons often arrived in a day, and as many were on the following morning sent out to execution. Night and day the cars incessantly discharged victims into the prison; weeping mothers and trembling orphans were thrust in without mercy with the brave and the powerful; the young, the beautiful, the unfortunate, seemed in a peculiar manner the prey of the assassins. Nor were the means of evacuating the prisons augmented in a less fearful progression. Fifteen only were at first placed on the chariot, but their number was soon augmented to thirty, and gradually rose to eighty persons, who daily were sent forth to the place of execution; when the fall of Robespierre put a stop to the murders, arrangements had been made for increasing it to one hundred and fifty. An immense aqueduct to remove the gore had been dug as far as the Place St. Antoine, and four men were daily employed in emptying the blood of the victims into that reservoir.

It was three in the afternoon when the melancholy procession set out from the Conciergerie; the troop slowly passed through the vaulted passages of the prison amid crowds of captives, who gazed with insatiable avidity on the aspect of those about to undergo a fate which might so soon become their own. The higher orders, in general, behaved with firmness and serenity; silently they marched to death with their eyes fixed on the heavens, lest their looks should betray their indignation. Numbers of the lower class piteously bewailed their fate and called Heaven and earth to witness their innocence. The pity of the spectators was in a peculiar manner excited by the bands of females led out together to execution; fourteen young women of Verdun, of the most attractive forms, were cut off together. "The day after their execution," says Riouffe, “the court of the prison looked like a garden bereaved of its flowers by a tempest. On another occasion twenty women of Poitou, chiefly the wives of peasants, were placed together on the chariot; some died on the way, and the wretches guillotined their lifeless remains. One kept her infant in her bosom till she reached the foot of the scaffold; the executioners tore the innocent from her breast, and the screams of maternal agony were only stifled with her life.

Such accumulated horrors annihilated all the charities and intercourse of life. Before daybreak the shops of the provision-merchants were besieged by crowds of women and children clamoring for the food which the law of the maximum in general prevented them from obtaining. The farmers trembled to bring their fruits to the market, the shopkeepers to expose them to sale. The

richest quarters of the town were deserted; no equipages or crowds of passengers were to be seen on the streets; the sinister words Propriété Nationale ("National Property" -that is, confiscated to the state), imprinted in large characters on the walls, everywhere showed how far the work of confiscation had proceeded. Passengers hesitated to address their most intimate friends on meeting: the extent of calamity had rendered men suspicious even of those they loved the most. Every one assumed the coarsest dress and the most squalid appearance: an elegant exterior would have been the certain forerunner of destruction. At one hour only were any symptoms of animation to be seen it was when the victims were conveyed to execution. The humane fled with horror from the sight; the infuriated rushed in crowds to satiate their eyes with the sight of human agony.

Night came, but with it no diminution of the anxiety of the people. Every family early assembled its members; with trembling looks they gazed round the room, fearful that the very walls might harbor traitors. The sound of a foot, the stroke of a hammer, a voice in the streets, froze all hearts with horror. If a knock was beard at the door, every one, in agonized suspense, expected his fate. Unable to endure such protracted misery, numbers committed suicide. "Had the reign of Robespierre," says Fréron, “continued longer, multitudes would have thrown themselves under the guillotine: the first of social affections, the love of life, was already extinguished in almost every heart."

In the midst of these unparalleled atrocities the Convention were occupied with the establishment of the civic virtues. Robespierre

pronounced a discourse on the qualities suited to a republic. He dedicated a certain number of the decennial fêtes to the Supreme Being, to Truth, to Justice, to Modesty, to Friendship, to Frugality, to Good Faith, to Glory and to Immortality. Barère prepared a report on the suppression of mendicity and the means of relieving the indigent poor. Robespierre had now reached the zenith of his popularity with his faction; he was denominated the Great Man of the Republic; his virtue, his genius, his eloquence, were in every mouth.

The speech which Robespierre made on this occasion was one of the most remarkable of his whole career:

"The idea of a Supreme Being and of the immortality of the soul is a continual call to justice; it is therefore a social and republican principle. Who has authorized you to declare that the Deity does not exist? Oh, you who support in such impassioned strains so arid a doctrine, what advantage do you expect to derive from the principle that a blind fatality regulates the affairs of men, and that the soul is nothing but a breath of air impelled toward the tomb? Will the idea of nonentity inspire man with more pure and elevated sentiments than that of immortality? Will it awaken more respect for others or himself, more courage to resist tyranny, greater contempt for pleasure or death? You who regret a virtuous friend, can you endure the thought that his noblest part has not escaped dissolution? You who weep over the remains of a child or a wife, are you consoled by the thought that a handful of dust is all that remains of the beloved object? You, the unfortunate, who expire under the strokes of an assassin, is not your last voice raised to appeal to the justice

"Observe how, on all former occasions, tyrants have sought to stifle the idea of the immortality of the soul. With what art did Cæsar, when pleading in the Roman Senate in favor of the accomplices of Catiline, endeavor to throw doubts on the belief of its immortality! while Cicero invokes against the traitor the sword of the laws and the vengeance of Heaven. Socrates, on the verge of death, discoursed with his friends on the ennobling theme; Leonidas, at Thermopyla, on the eve of executing the most heroic design ever conceived by man, invited his companions to a banquet in another world. The principles of the Stoics gave birth to Brutus and Cato even in the ages which witnessed the expiry of Roman virtue; they alone saved the honor of human nature, almost obliterated by the vices and the corruption of the empire.

"The Encyclopédists, who introduced the frightful doctrine of atheism, were ever in politics below the dignity of freedom; in morality they went as far beyond the dictates of reason. Their disciples declaimed against despotism and received the pensions of despots; they composed alternately tirades against kings and madrigals for their mistresses; they were fierce with their pens and rampant in antechambers. That sect propagated with infinite care the principles of materialism; we owe to them that selfish philosophy which reduced egotism to a system, regarded human society as a game of chance where success was the sole distinction

"The priests have figured to themselves a God in their own image; they have made him jealous, capricious. cruel, covetous, implacable; they have enthroned him in the heavens as a palace, and called him to the earth only to demand for their behoof tithes, riches, pleasures, honors and power. The true temple of the Supreme Being is the universe; his worship, virtue; his fêtes, the joy of a great people assembled under his eyes to tighten the bonds of social affection and present to him the homage of pure and grateful hearts."

In the midst of the acclamations produced by these eloquent words, the Assembly decreed unanimously that they recognized the existence of the Supreme Being and of the immortality of the soul, and that the worship most worthy of him was the practice of the social virtues.

This speech is not only remarkable as containing the religious views of so memorable an actor in the bloodiest periods of the Revolution, but as involving a moral lesson of perhaps greater moment than any that occurred during its whole progress. For the first time in the annals of mankind a great nation had thrown off all religious principles and openly defied the power of Heaven itself, and from amid the wreck which was occasioned by the unchaining of human passions arose a solemn recognition of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. It seemed as if Providence had permitted human wickedness to run its utmost length in order, amid the frightful scene, to demonstrate the necessity of religious belief and vindicate