At the other extremity of Paris there is a club still more inflammatory than that of the Jacobins: {7} that of the Cordeliers. "The Jacobins," said Barbaroux, "have no common aim, although they act in concert. The Cordeliers are bent on blood, gold, and offices." Speaking as a rule, the Cordeliers belong to the Jacobin Club, while hardly a single Jacobin is a Cordelier. The Cordeliers are the advance-guard of the Revolution. They are, as Camille Desmoulins has said, Jacobins of the Jacobins. The chiefs are Danton, Marat, Hébert, Chaumette. They take their names from those religious democrats, the Minorite friars of Saint Francis, who wear a girdle of rope over their coarse gray habit. They meet in the Place of the School of Medicine, in a monastery whose church was built in the reign of Saint Louis, in 1259, with the fine paid as indemnity for a murder. In 1590, it became the resort of the most famous Leaguers. Chateaubriand says: "There are places which seem to be the laboratory of seditions." How well this expression of the author of the _Mémoires d'Outre-tombe_ describes the club-room of the Cordeliers! The pictures, the sculptured or painted images, the veils and curtains of the convent, have been torn down. The basilica displays nothing but its bare bones to the eyes of the spectator. At the apse, where wind and rain enter through the unglazed rose-window, joiners' work-benches serve as a desk for the president and as places on which to deposit the red caps. Do you see the fallen beams, the wooden benches, the dismantled stalls, the relics of saints pushed or rolled against the walls {8} to serve as benches for "dirty, dusty, drunken, sweaty spectators in torn jackets, pikes on their shoulders, or with their bare arms crossed"? Do you hear the orators who "call each other beggars, pickpockets, robbers, assassins, to the discordant noise of hisses and those proper to their different groups of devils? They find the material of their metaphors in murder, they borrow them from the filthiest of sewers and dungheaps, and from places set apart for the prostitution of men and women. Gestures render their figures of speech more comprehensible; with the cynicism of dogs, they call everything by its own name, in an impious and obscene parade of oaths and curses. To destroy and to produce, death and generation, nothing else can be disentangled from the savage jargon which deafens one's ear." And what is it that interrupts the speakers? "The little black owls of the cloister without monks and the steeple without bells, making themselves merry in the broken windows in expectation of their prey. At first they are called to order by the tinkling of an ineffectual bell; but as their cries do not cease, they are shot at to make them keep silence. They fall, palpitating, bleeding, and ominous, into the midst of the pandemonium."