"The proscribed had at first eagerly sought the shelter of the prisons as a refuge. When this melancholy bulwark was destroyed, like everything else that men had formerly held sacred--like the churches and the tombs--the administration endeavored to provide for the safety of the victims by sending them out of the provinces. To protect them from private vengeance, the authorities sent them sixty or eighty miles away from their wives and children, among men who knew neither their names nor their station. The fatal move only resulted in changing the place of sepulchre. These parties in death exchanges delivered their prey from one department to another with the regularity of commercial transactions. Never had business-like habits been thus degraded to horrible traffic. Nor were these barbarous drafts, payable in men's heads, protested when they came due. As soon as the letter of advice arrived they would coolly balance debits and credits, and carry forward the balances, and the check drawn in blood would be honored at sight. "This spectacle, the very idea of which is revolting to the soul, was often renewed. Picture to yourself one of those long carts with racks in which animals are taken to the shambles, and hurdled upon them in confusion, men, their hands and feet securely tied with cords, their heads hanging down, swaying with each jolt of the cart, panting for breath, in despair and terror, for crimes of which the greatest was an excited outburst which had spent itself in threatening words. Do not imagine for a second that the feast of the martyrs or the expiatory honors of the sacrifice were prepared for them on their return, or that they were even allowed the empty satisfaction of offering for a moment an impossible resistance to an attack without peril, as in the arenas of Constantius and Gallus. The assassins surprised them as they lay; and they were murdered in their bonds, and the club, reddened with blood, continued to play upon their bodies long after they had ceased to feel." Nodier once saw and described to me a septuagenarian noted for his gentleness of manner and that scrupulous courtesy which is esteemed above all else in provincial salons; one of those men of breeding who are becoming almost extinct, and who used to make one visit to Paris to pay their court to the minister, and to be present at the king's card-party and hunting-party, and who owed to this happy memory the privilege of dining from time to time with the _intendant_, and of giving their opinion on important occasions upon questions of etiquette. Nodier saw him--while women looked on calmly holding their children in their arms, and while the latter clapped their little hands--Nodier saw him, and I quote his very words, "wearying his withered old arm striking a corpse with his gold-headed cane, in which the assassins had neglected to extinguish the last spark of life, and which had just betrayed its agony by a final convulsion."