The popular pictures grew ill-tempered as the hopes of the people declined, and the word _aristocrat_ became synonymous with all that is most hostile to the happiness of man. A devil attired as a priest, teaching a school of little aristocrats, extols the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Citizens and soldiers are in full cry after a many-headed monster labeled "Aristocracy." An ass presides over a court of justice, and the picture is inscribed, "The Ass on the Bench; or, the End of Old Times." The clergy came in for their ample share of ridicule and vituperation. "What do we want with monks?" exclaimed an orator from the tribune of the Assembly in 1790. "If you tell me," he continued, "that it is just to allow pious men the liberty to lead a sedentary, solitary, or contemplative life, my answer is, that every man can be sedentary, solitary, or contemplative in his own room." Another speaker said, "If England to-day is flourishing, she owes it in part to the abolition of the religious orders." The caricaturists did not delay to aim their shafts at this new game. We see nuns trying on fashionable head-dresses, and friars blundering through a military exercise. The spectacle was exhibited to Europe of a people raging with contemptuous hate of every thing which had from time immemorial been held in honor. [Illustration: President of a Revolutionary Committee amusing Himself with his Art before the Session begins. (Paris, 1793.)] As time wore on, after every other order in the State had been in turn the object of special animosity, the royal family, the envied victims of the old state of things, became the unpitied victims of the new. Until their ill-starred attempt to escape from France in June, 1792, there remained some little respect for the king, and some tenderness for his children. The picture given elsewhere of the crucifixion of the king was published by his adherents some months before the crisis as figurative of his sufferings, not as prophetic of his fate. But there was neither respect nor pity for the unhappy man after his blundering attempt to leave the country. An explosion of caricature followed. Before that event satirical pictures had been exposed only in the print-sellers' windows, but now, as M. Bayer records, "caricatures were sold wherever any thing was sold." The Jacobin Club, he adds, as often as they had a point to carry, caused caricatures to be made, which the shop-keepers found it to their interest to keep for sale. [Illustration: Rare Animals: or, The Transfer of the Royal Family from the Tuileries to the Temple. (Champfleury, 1792.)]