Later, both in Paris and the provinces, this severity was commended, and held up to admiration as the truest mercy; on the ground that it stamped out the fire of revolt which was on the point of blazing up and prevented it spreading to the rest of France. But, looking back, I find in it another thing; I find in it not mercy, but the first, or nearly the first, instance of that strange contempt of human life which marked the Revolution in its later stages; of that extravagance of cruelty which three years afterwards paralysed society and astounded the world, and, by the horrible excesses into which it occasionally led men, proved to the philosophers of the Human Race that France in the last days of the eighteenth century could do in the daylight, at Arras and Nantes and Paris, deeds which the tyrants of old confined to the dark recesses of their torture-chambers: deeds--I blush to say it--that no other polite country has matched in this age. But with these crimes--and be it understood I do not refer here to the work of the guillotine--I thank God that I have at this time nothing to do. They left their traces on later pages of my life--as on the life of what Frenchman have they not?--and some day I may revert to them. But my task here barely touches them. It is enough for me to say that of eighteen men who shared with me the horrors of the alley by the Capuchins, four only lived to tell the tale, and look back on the walls of Nîmes; they and I owing our lives in part to the timely arrival of Buton and some foreign representatives, who did not share the Cevennols' fanaticism, and partly to the late relenting of the murderers themselves. Of the four, Father Benôit and Louis St. Alais were two, and strange was the meeting, when we three, so wonderfully preserved, with clothes still torn and disordered, and faces splashed with blood, came together in the upstairs _salon_ at Madame Catinot's. The shutters of the room, with the exception of one high corner shutter, were still closed; dead ashes lay white and cold in the empty fire-place, that had blazed so cheerfully in my honour the night I supped with Madame Catinot. The whole room was gloomy and chill, the furniture cast long shadows, and up the stairs came the clamour of the mob, that having seen us into the house eddied curiously round the scene of the murder, and could not have enough of it. A strange meeting, for we three had all loved one another, and by stress of the times had been separated. Now we met as from the grave, ghostly figures, livid, trembling, with shaking hands and eyes burning with the light of fever; but with all differences purged away. "My Brother!" "Your Brother!" and Louis' hands met mine, as if the dead man who had died with the courage of his race joined them; while Father Benôit wrung his hands in uncontrollable grief or walked the room, crying: "My poor children! Oh, my poor children! God have mercy on this land!"