the Palais Royal. The Duke of Orleans was at a window with his mistress, Madame de Buffon. He left it, but he may have seen the head of his sister-in-law. Some of the cannibals had remained in the neighborhood of the Temple. Sitting down at table in a wine-shop, they had the heart of the Princess de Lamballe cooked, and ate it with avidity. "Thus," says M. de Beauchesne in his excellent work on Louis XVII., "this civilization which had departed from God, surpassed at a single bound the fury of savages, and the eighteenth century, so proud of its learning and humanity, ended by anthropophagy." In the evening, when some one was giving Collot d'Herbois an account of the day's performances, he expressed but one regret,--that they had not succeeded in showing Marie Antoinette the remains of the Princess de Lamballe. "What!" he spitefully exclaimed, "did they spare the Queen that impression? They ought to have served up her best friend's head in a covered dish at her table." {359} XXXV. THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES. Lovers of paradoxes have tried to represent the September massacres as something spontaneous, a passing delirium of opinion, a sort of great national convulsion. This myth was a lie against history and humanity. It exists no longer, Heaven be thanked. The mists with which it was sought to shroud these execrable crimes are now dissipated. Light has been shed upon that series of infernal spectacles which would have made cannibals blush. No; these odious massacres were not the result of a popular movement, an unforeseen fanaticism, a paroxysm of rage or vengeance. They present an ensemble of murders committed in cool blood, a planned and premeditated thing. M. Mortimer-Ternaux, in his _Histoire de la Terreur_, M. Granier de Cassagnac, in his _Histoire des Girondins et des Massacres de Septembre_, have proved this abundantly. They have exhumed from the archives and the record offices such a mass of uncontested and incontestable documents, that not the slightest doubt is now permissible. Edgar Quinet has not hesitated to recognize this in his book, _La Révolution_. He says: "The {360} massacres were executed administratively; the same discipline was everywhere displayed throughout the carnage.... This was not a piece of blind, spontaneous barbarism; it was a barbarity slowly meditated, minutely elaborated by a sanguinary mind. Hence it bears no resemblance to anything previously known in history. Marat harvested in September what he had been sowing for three years." The Parisian populace, eight hundred thousand souls, was inert; it was cowardly, it trembled; but it did not approve, it was not an accomplice. It was a monstrous thing that a handful of cut-throats should be enough to transform Paris into a slaughter-house. One shudders in thinking what a few criminals can accomplish in the midst of an immense population. "The people, the real people--that composed of laborious and honest workmen, ardent and