There was a woman, known on account of her charms as the Beautiful Flower Girl, who was accused of having wounded {368} her lover, a French guard, in a fit of jealousy. Théroigne de Mericourt, an amazon of the gutters, was her rival. She pointed her out to the assassins. They fastened her naked to a post, her legs apart and her feet nailed to the ground. They burned her alive. They cut off her breasts with sabre strokes. They impaled her on a hot iron. Her shrieks carried dismay as far as the outer banks of the Seine. Théroigne was at the height of felicity. At the Salpêtrière there was still another spectacle. This prison for fallen women is a place of correction for the old, of amendment for the young, and an asylum for those who are still children. More than forty children of the lower classes were slain during these horrible days. The delirium of murder reached its height. Gorged with wine mingled with gunpowder, intoxicated with the fumes and reek of carnage, the assassins experienced a devouring, inextinguishable thirst for blood which nothing could quench. More blood, and yet more blood! And where can it now be found? The prisons are empty. There are no more nobles, no more priests, to put to death. Very well! for lack of anything better, they will go to an asylum for the poor, the sick, and the insane; to the Bicêtre. Vagabonds, paupers, fools, thieves, steward, chaplains, janitor, all is fish that comes to their net. The butchery lasts five days and nights without stopping. Massacre takes every form; some are drowned in the cellars, others shot in the courts. Water, fire, and sword, every sort of torture. {369} The cut-throats can at last take some repose. They have worked all the week. There are still some, however, who have not yet had enough, and who are going to continue the massacres of Paris in the provinces. The Communal Council of Surveillance has taken care to send to every commune in France a circular bearing the seal of the Minister of Justice, inviting them to follow the example of the capital. September 9, the prisoners who had been detained at Orleans to be tried there by the Superior Court, entered Versailles on carts. At the moment when they approached the grating of the Orangery, assassins sent from Paris under the lead of Fournier "the American" sprang upon them and immolated every one. Thus perished the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Lessart, and the Duke de Brissac, former commander of the Constitutional Guard. Fournier "the American"[2] returned on horseback to Paris and began to caracole on the Place Vendôme; Danton loudly felicitated him on the success of the expedition, from the balcony of the Ministry of Justice.