The prison floors were often covered with infants, distressed by hunger, or in the agonies of death. One evening, three hundred infants were in one prison; the next morning all were drowned! When the citizens once remonstrated at this useless cruelty, the reply was, “They are all young aristocratic vipers--let them be stifled!” Such accumulated horrors annihilated the sympathies and charities of life. Calamity rendered every man suspicious. Those passing in the streets feared to address their nearest friends. As wealth was a mark for ruin, all put on coarse, or squalid raiment. Abroad, no symptom of animation was seen, except when prisoners were led forth to slaughter, and then the humane fled, and the hard-hearted rushed forward to look upon the agonies of death. In the family circle, all was fear and distrust. The sound of a footstep, a voice in the street, a knock at the door, sent paleness to the cheek. Night brought little repose, and in the morning all eyed each other distrustfully, as if traitors were lurking there. But there is a limit to the power of mental suffering; and one of the saddest features of this awful period was the torpid apathy, which settled on the public mind, so that, eventually, the theatres, which had been forsaken, began to be thronged, and the multitude relieved themselves by farces and jokes, unconcerned whether it was twenty, or a hundred of their fellow-citizens, who were led forth to die. Learning and talent were as fatal to their possessors as rank and wealth. The son of Buffon the naturalist, the daughter of the eloquent Vernay, Roucher the poet, and even the illustrious Lavoisier, in the midst of his philosophical experiments, were cut down. A few more weeks of slaughter would have swept off all the literary talent of France. During the revolutionary period, it is calculated that not less than two hundred thousand persons suffered imprisonment, besides those who were put to death, of whom the following list is furnished by the Republicans themselves: Twelve hundred and seventy-eight nobles, seven hundred and fifty women of rank, fourteen hundred of the clergy, and thirteen thousand persons not noble, perished by the guillotine under decrees of the tribunals of the people. To this, add the victims at Nantz, which are arranged in this mournful catalogue: Children shot 500 Children drowned 1500 Women shot 264 Women drowned 500 Priests shot and drowned 760 Nobles drowned 1400 Artisans drowned 5300 The whole number destroyed at Nantz, of which the above is a portion only, was thirty-two thousand.