"The people are not to be insulted. The people order, and all must obey!" Nothing could be more unanswerable, and no attempt was made to answer. The captain dropped back into the chaise, the troop took their own way, and my next glance showed the street empty. But the Frenchman finds comfort under all calamities. After venting his wrath in no measured terms on "rabble insolence," and declaring that laws were of no use when "_gueux_" like these could take them into their hands, he consoled himself by observing that, stripped as he was of his honours, the loss might be compensated by his profits; that the "vagabonds" might have expected to share the reward which the "grand Danton would infallibly be rejoiced to give for my capture, and that both the purse and the praise would be his own." "_A l'Abbaye_!" was the cry once more. We now were in motion again; and, after threading a labyrinth of streets, so dreary and so dilapidated as almost to give me the conception that I had never been in Paris before, we drove up to the grim entrance of the Abbaye. My companion left me in charge of the sentinel, and rushed in. "And is this," thought I, as I looked round the narrow space of the four walls, "the spot where so many hundreds were butchered; this the scene of the first desperate triumph of massacre; this miserable court the last field of so many gallant lives; these stones the last resting-place of so many whose tread had been on cloth of gold; these old and crumbling walls giving the last echo to the voices of statesmen and nobles, the splendid courtiers, the brilliant orators, and the hoary ecclesiastics, of the most superb kingdom of Europe!" Even by the feeble lamp-light, that rather showed the darkness than the forms of the surrounding buildings, it seemed to me that I could discover the colour of the slaughter on the ground; and there were still heaps in corners, which looked to me like clay suddenly flung over the remnants of the murdered. But my reveries were suddenly broken up by the return of the little captain, more angry than ever. He had missed the opportunity of seeing the "great man," who had gone to the Salpetrière. And some of the small men who performed as his jackals, having discovered that the captain was looking for a share in their plunder, had thought proper to treat him, his commission, and even his civism, with extreme contempt. In short, as he avowed to me, the very first use which he was determined to make of that supreme power to which his ascent was inevitable, would be to clear the _bureaux_ of France, beginning with Paris, of all those insolent and idle hangers-on, who lived only to purloin the profits, and libel the services, of "good citizens."