During all this time, what efforts had the Assembly made to put a stop to the murders? None, absolutely none. Never has any deliberative body shown a like cowardice. Neither Vergniaud's voice nor that of any other Girondin was heard in protest. Indignation, pity, found not a single word to say. Speeches, {370} discussions, votes on different questions, went on as usual. Concerning the massacres, not a syllable. During that infamous week, neither the ministers, the virtuous Roland not more than the others, neither Pétion, the mayor of Paris, nor the commander of the National Guard sent a picket guard of fifty men to any quarter to prevent the murders. A population of eight hundred thousand souls and a National Guard of fifty thousand men bent their necks under the yoke of a handful of bandits, of two hundred and thirty-five assassins (the exact number is known). People trembled. At the Assembly the old moderate party had disappeared. There were not more than two hundred odd deputies present at the shameful and powerless sessions. Terrorized Paris was in a state of stupor and prostration. The murderers ended by execrating themselves. Tormented by remorse, they could see nothing before them but vivid faces, reeking entrails, bleeding limbs. "Among the cut-throats," M. Louis Blanc has said, "some gave signs of insanity that led to the supposition that some mysterious and terrible drug had been mingled with the wine they drank." Some of them became furious madmen. Others sought refuge in suicide, killing themselves the moment they had no one else to kill. Others enlisted. They were chased out of the army. Among these was the man who had carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe on a pike. One day when he was boasting of his murders, the soldiers became indignant and {371} put him to death. Others still were tried as Septembrists and sent to the scaffold. The guilty received their punishment, even on this earth. Well! there are people nowadays who would like to rehabilitate them! In vain has Lamartine, the founder of the Second Republic, exclaimed in a burst of noble wrath: "Has human speech an execration, an anathema, which is equal to the horror these crimes of cannibals inspire in me, as in all civilized men?" In vain have the most celebrated historians of democracy, Edgar Quinet and Michelet, expressed in eloquent terms their indignation against these crimes. In vain has M. Louis Blanc said: "Every murder is a suicide. In the victim the body alone is killed; but what is killed in the murderer is the soul." There are men who would not alone excuse, but glorify the assassinations and the assassins! [1] M. Mortimer-Ternaux, _Histoire de la Terreur_. [2] Claude Fournier-Lhéritier, was born in Auvergne, 1745, and served as a volunteer in Santo Domingo, 1772-85, with Toussaint l'Ouverture, whence his sobriquet "the American." {372} XXXVI. MADAME ROLAND DURING THE MASSACRES.