A few months later in that fateful year a more terrible calamity befell the city, when the reign of terror under the notorious ultra-revolutionist, Jean B. Carrier, began. Carrier reached Nantes on October 8 and at once proposed to exterminate both the Vendean royalists and their Nantais sympathizers. He reorganized the entire administration to suit his purposes, and to carry out his plans recruited from the lowest classes a revolutionary army to spy upon, denounce and arrest private citizens, many of whom were sent to Paris for trial when not secretly dispatched. The whole district was soon paralyzed by the barbarity of the crimes then committed, and the unhappy Vendeans were dragged to Nantes, to be shot, guillotined or drowned, in such numbers that the city was unable to bury its dead or the river to discharge them to the sea. Thus perished thousands, uncounted if not unknown, and the pestilence of typhoid fever that immediately followed claimed another heavy toll regardless of political sympathies. While these dire scenes were being enacted, Jean Jacques Fougère Audubon, then a lad of eight years, was living in the heart of Nantes, and his father was one of its leading revolutionists. An aunt of the future ornithologist, according to his account, who was one of these wretched victims of revolutionary fury, was dragged through the streets of Nantes before his eyes, but apparently she did not actually meet her death at that time.[61] That Jean Audubon moved his family out of Nantes during the revolutionary crisis is possible, and Couëron would have been available as a place of refuge. Many Nantais are known to have fled to Lorient on the coast of Brittany, where they found in the heroic youth Julien the ardent and fearless patriot who was destined to become the real savior of their stricken city. Young Julien denounced Carrier in his letters to Robespierre, and when one of these was intercepted, defied him in person. When his stirring appeals finally reached the Tribunal at Paris, its misnamed representative was recalled, and left Nantes under cover of night on February 14, 1794. During his mad reign of four months, Carrier had gone far towards carrying out his theory of republican government, that should begin, as he openly avowed, by "suppressing" half of the population of France. The records show that nearly nine thousand bodies were buried in Nantes in a little over three months, from January 15 to April 24, 1794. The plague of fever no doubt accounted for many of these, but the wide reaches of the Loire never told their full story.