"And why did it rise up? To demand a sacrifice pleasing to God, namely, that women should no longer be spared but slaughtered! Happily, indeed, the Republicans, the National Guard from Nantes, arrived. "'Alas!' the townspeople said to them, coming to them weeping and wringing their hands, 'you come too late! You can but save the walls, the town itself is exterminated!...' "And they pointed to the place where men had been buried alive. Horrified, they beheld a shrivelled hand which in the fearful anguish of suffocation had seized hold of and twisted the withered grasses...." Is it any good to speak about Carrier after all this? What would it serve to tell of his _bateaux à Soupapes_;[2] of his _bagnades républicaines_; of his _mariages révolutionnaires_ [men and women bound hands and feet together and thrown into the Loire]; of his _déportations verticales._[3] It would only be to set crime against crime, which would prove nothing beyond the wickedness of man. Besides, Carrier has atoned for his crimes. I am well aware that though this may have been enough to satisfy the requirements of justice as far as the man himself was concerned, it has not been sufficient to satisfy history. It was in vain for Carrier to struggle with all his might and main against the accusation, which came upon him like a shock; in vain for him to exclaim, with sombre eyes, outstretched arms and strident voice, to his old colleagues, now become his judges-- "I do not understand you! You must be mad! Why blame me to-day for doing what you gave me orders to do yesterday? In accusing me, the Convention accuses itself.... My condemnation, look to it, is your condemnation also; you will find yourselves caught in the same proscription with me: if I am guilty, so is every man here ... every one, every one, every one! down to the very bell on the president's table!" But all his cries were useless. And herein lies the horror of revolutions; they reach a pitch at which the same terror that drove them into action drives them into reaction, and in which the guillotine, sated with drinking the blood of the accused, is callously and indifferently willing to drink the blood of judges and executioners! This reaction, which set in two days later, saved the lives of André Chénier and M. Villenave, together with a hundred and thirty-one of the Nantais, his companions. [Footnote 1: Alas! since these lines were penned death has intervened in the life and happiness of this poor lady, for I read in the papers one day at Brussels, in words as cold as the steel of the Middle Ages which used to be placed in the hands of a skeleton:-- "Madame Bataillard, daughter of Madame Mélanie Waldor, has just died after a long and painful illness. The funeral will take place to-morrow. Any friends who may not have received an invitation to be present are invited to attend at the cemetery at eleven o'clock."