Harper's New Monthly Magazine: No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III.Various
History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine: No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
The daughter was left mangled and dying upon the beach; the father was
borne by the rush into one boat, the wife into another, and no one knew
who was living, and who, mercifully, was dead. The ships, the magazines,
the arsenals were all now in flames. The Jacobins of Toulon began to
emerge from garrets and cellars, and frenzied with intoxication, like
demons of darkness, with torch and sword, rioted through the city,
attacked the flying royalists, tore their garments from their backs, and
inflicted upon maids and matrons every conceivable brutality. A little
after midnight two frigates, each containing many thousand barrels of
gunpowder, blew up, with an explosion so terrific, that it seemed to
shake, like an earthquake, even the solid hills. As at last the
rear-guard of the English abandoned the ramparts and hurried to their
boats, the triumphant republican army, nearly forty thousand strong,
came rushing into the city at all points. The allied fleet, with
favoring winds, spread its sails, and soon disappeared beneath the
horizon of the silent sea, bearing away nearly twenty thousand wretched
exiles to homelessness, penury, and a life-long woe.
Dugommier, the commander of the republican army, notwithstanding all his
exertions, found it utterly impossible to restrain the passions of his
victorious soldiers, and for many days violence and crime ran rampant
in the doomed city. The crime of having raised the flag of royalty, and
of having surrendered the city and its stores to the foe, was one not to
be forgiven. The Jacobin government in Paris sent orders for a bloody
and a terrible vengeance, that the loyalists all over France might be
intimidated from again conspiring with the enemy. Napoleon did every
thing in his power to protect the inhabitants from the fury which was
wreaked upon them. He witnessed, with anguish, scenes of cruelty which
he could not repress. An old merchant, eighty-four years of age, deaf
and almost blind, was guilty of the crime of being worth five millions
of dollars. The Convention, coveting his wealth, sentenced him to the
scaffold. "When I witnessed the inhuman execution of this old man," said
Napoleon, "I felt as if the end of the world was at hand." He exposed
his own life to imminent peril in his endeavors to save the helpless
from Jacobin rage. One day a Spanish prize was brought into the harbor,
on board of which had been taken the noble family of Chabrillant, well
known loyalists, who were escaping from France. The mob, believing that
they were fleeing to join the emigrants and the allied army in their
march against Paris, rushed to seize the hated aristocrats, and to hang
them, men and women, at the nearest lamp-posts. The guard came up for
their rescue and were repulsed. Napoleon saw among the rioters several
gunners who had served under him during the siege. He mounted a
platform, and their respect for their general secured him a hearing. He
induced them, by those powers of persuasion which he so eminently
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