It was on a night of middle Vendémiaire in the year two (to affect the whimsical jargon of the _sans-culottes_) that I issued from my burrow with an intrepidity that was nothing more nor less than a congestion of the sensibilities. Fear at that time having fed upon itself till all was devoured, was converted in very many to a humorous stoicism that only lacked to be great because it could not boast a splendid isolation. “Suspect of being suspect”--Citizen Chaumette’s last slash at the hamstrings of hope--had converted all men of humane character to that religion of self-containment that can alone spiritually exalt above the caprices of the emotions. Thousands, in a moment, through extreme of fear became fearless; hence no man of them could claim a signal inspiration of courage, but only that subscription to the terms of it which unnatural conditions had rendered necessary to all believers in the ultimate ethical triumph of the human race. I do not mean to say that I was tired of life, but simply that it came to me at once that I must not hold that test of moral independence at the mercy of any temporal tyranny whatsoever. Indeed I was still so far in love with existence physically, as to neglect no precaution that was calculated to contribute to the present prolonging of it. I wore my frieze night-cap, carmagnole, sabots, and black shag spencer with all the assumption I could muster of being to the shoddy born. I had long learned the art of slurring a sigh into a cough or expectoration. I could curse the stolid spectres of the tumbrils so as to deceive all but the recording angel, and, possibly, Citizen Robespierre. Nevertheless, with me, as with others, precaution seemed but a condition of the recklessness whose calculations never extended beyond the immediate day or hour. We lived posthumous lives, so to speak, and would hardly have resented it, should an arbitrary period have been put to our revisiting of the “glimpses of the moon.” On this night, then, of early September (as I will prefer calling it) I issued from my burrow, calm under the intolerable tyranny of circumstance. Desiring to reconstruct myself on the principle of an older independence, I was mentally discussing the illogic of a system of purgation that was seeking to solve the problem of existence by emptying the world, when I became aware that my preoccupied ramblings had brought me into the very presence of that sombre engine that was the concrete expression of so much and such detestable false reasoning. In effect, and to speak without circumbendibus, I found myself to have wandered into the Faubourg St Antoine--into the place of execution, and to have checked my steps only at the very foot of the guillotine.