The weak remains of the Lyonnais army at first met with but few obstacles; but they were soon pursued by large bodies of cavalry: their retreat became a disorderly flight; they threw themselves into the thickest woods; instead of rejoicing in their silence, the sound of the tocsin came upon their ears from all parts, and that was for them the tocsin of death. Countrymen, armed with forks and scythes, surrounded every issue of the forests, waited for, and massacred men already conquered by hunger and despair. The column led by M. de Virieu was entirely destroyed, and not more than fifty or sixty escaped of that of Prëcy. The next day, the 9th of October, the republican army took possession of all the abandoned posts of Lyons, which city it entered without opposition. The Convention decreed that the walls and public buildings should be destroyed, and the name of the city changed to _Ville Affranchie_. Of three thousand five hundred and twenty-eight of the insurgents, as they were called, who were brought to trial on account of this siege, one thousand six hundred and eighty-two were either shot or beheaded. In 1794, however, on the destruction of the faction of the Jacobins, the Convention decreed that the city should resume its ancient name, and that measures should be taken to restore its manufactures and commerce. In 1795, the friends of those who were so wantonly put to death in 1793, revenged their fate by a general massacre of the judges of the revolutionary tribunal, and of all the Jacobins who were then confined in the prisons of Lyons. PALMYRA. A.D. 273. Palmyra, with its transitory splendour, and its total annihilation, its association with two extraordinary men,--Longinus and Odenathus, and perhaps a still more extraordinary woman,--Zenobia, has been the subject of the poet’s song, the theme of the historian, and a source of deep reflection for the statesman or the philosopher. The history of Palmyra is a short but highly interesting episode in the annals of mankind, illustrated, in the course of a very few years, by the valour and ability of Odenathus, the wisdom and cultivated taste of Longinus, and the splendid beauty, great talents, and masculine mind of Zenobia. As it is said the sun of the glory of Thebes rose and set with Epaminondas, so the splendour of Palmyra is so connected with the name of Zenobia, that they seem to us to have been entirely co-existent; we look at the nascent prosperity of Palmyra before her birth, as a preparation for her future fortune; and we contemplate the vast ruins of the city as so many monuments remaining undestroyed to perpetuate her memory. No great city was ever so completely identified with a person as Palmyra with Zenobia. Of the siege itself, even Gibbon has given but a meagre account; and yet, what reader would have pardoned us, if we had neglected to notice the fall of the gorgeous capital of the Queen of the East?