On the new standards waving in the breeze ran the legend: "The French people risen against Tyrants." Toulon was in the hands of the English; Lyons in revolt. With enemies in her camp, with one arm tied by the insurrection in La Vendee, the Revolution hurled her ragged and despised _sans-culottes_,[171] against her enemies. How vain is the wisdom of the great! Burke thought that the Revolution had expunged France in a political sense out of the system of Europe, and his opinion was shared by every European statesman; but before the year closed, the proud and magnificently accoutred armies of kings were scattered over the borders, civil war was crushed, the Revolution triumphant. Soon the "dwarfish, ragged _sans-culottes_, the small black-looking Marseillaises dressed in rags of every colour," whom Goethe saw tramping out of Mayence "as if the goblin king had opened his mountains and sent forth his lively host of dwarfs," had forced Prussia, the arch-champion of monarchy, to make peace and leave its Rhine provinces in the hands of regicides. Meanwhile terror reigned in Paris. In the frenzy of mortal strife the Revolution struck out blindly and cut down friend as well as foe; the innocent with the guilty. At least the guillotine fell swiftly and mercifully. Gone were the days of the wheel, the rack, the boiling lead and the stake. Under the _ancien regime_ the torture of _accused_ persons was one of the sights shown to foreigners in Paris. Evelyn, when visiting the city in 1651, was taken to see the torture of an _alleged_ thief in the Chatelet, who was "wracked in an extraordinary manner, so that they severed the fellow's joints in miserable sort." Failing to extort a confession, "they increased the extension and torture, and then placing a horne in his mouth, such as they drench horses with, poured two buckets of water down, so that it prodigiously swelled him." There was another "malefactor" to be dealt with, but the traveller had seen enough, and he leaves, reflecting that it represented to him "the intolerable sufferings which our Blessed Saviour must needs undergo when His body was hanging with all its weight upon the nailes of the Crosse." [Footnote 171: The term implied rather an excess than a defect of nether garment and was applied in scorn by the fashionable wearers of _culottes_ to the plebeian wearers of trousers.]