It was not to be wondered at that the Thermidorean reaction, suppressed in the first capital of France, had taken up its abode in the second, with branches at Marseilles and Besançon. What Lyons suffered after the revolt is well known. The guillotine was too slow, and Collot d'Herbois and Fouché supplemented it with grape and canister. There were few families at that time, belonging either to the rich commercial classes or the nobility, who had not lost one or more of its members. The time had now come to avenge the lost father, brother or son; and they were avenged openly, publicly, in broad daylight. "You caused the death of my father, my son, or my brother," they would say to the informer, and then they would immediately strike him down. "Speculation in regard to murder," says Nodier, "was largely indulged in among the upper classes. There, secrets of murder were recounted in the salons which would have terrified the galleys. Men played _Charlemagne_ with death for the stakes, without even taking the trouble to lower their voices when they discussed their plans of killing. The women, sweet alleviators of all the passions of men, took part in these dreadful discussions of death. Since horrible hags no longer wore guillotines for ear-rings, 'adorable furies,' as Corneille would have said, wore daggers for breast-pins. If you objected on sentimental grounds to these frightful excesses, they would take you to the Brotteaux and make you tread, in spite of yourself, upon the elastic springy soil, saying: 'Our relatives are there.' What a picture do these exceptional times present, whose nameless, indefinable character cannot be expressed by the facts themselves, so inadequate are words to reproduce the unheard of confusion of ideas, so antipathetic in themselves, the union of the most refined methods with implacable fury, the horrifying compact between the doctrines of humanity and deeds worthy of cannibalism. How can we convey an adequate impression of this impossible time when prison-cells did not protect the prisoners, when the executioner, who came in search of his victim, found, to his astonishment, that he had been preceded by the assassin--this never-ending 2d of September, renewed every day by respectable young men who had just left a salon, and who were expected in a boudoir?