His observations on the massacre of the preceding day are such as cannot be passed over. "Yesterday," said he, "was a day upon the events of which it is perhaps necessary to leave a _veil_. I know that the people with their vengeance _mingled a sort of justice_: they did not take for victims _all_ who presented themselves to their fury; they directed it to _them who had for a long time been spared by the sword of the law_, and who they _believed_, from the peril of circumstances, should be sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy to _villains and traitors_ to misrepresent this _effervescence_, and that it must be checked; I know that we owe to all France the declaration, that the _executive power_ could not foresee or prevent this excess; I know that it is due to the constituted authorities to place a limit to it, or consider themselves as abolished." In the midst of this carnage he thinks of nothing but throwing a veil over it,--which was at once to cover the guilty from punishment, and to extinguish all compassion for the sufferers. He apologizes for it; in fact, he justifies it. He who (as the reader has just seen in what is quoted from this letter) feels so much indignation at "vague denunciations," when made against himself, and from which he then feared nothing more than the subversion of his power, is not ashamed to consider the charge of a conspiracy to massacre the Parisians, brought against his master upon denunciations as vague as possible, or rather upon no denunciations, as a perfect justification of the monstrous proceedings against him. He is not ashamed to call the murder of the unhappy priests in the Carmes, who were under no criminal denunciation whatsoever, a "_vengeance_ mingled with a _sort of justice_"; he observes that they "had been a long time spared by the sword of the law," and calls by anticipation all those who should represent this "_effervescence_" in other colors _villains and traitors_: he did not than foresee how soon himself and his accomplices would be under the necessity of assuming the pretended character of this new sort of "_villany and treason_", in the hope of obliterating the memory of their former real _villanies and treasons_; he did not foresee that in the course of six months a formal manifesto on the part of himself and his faction, written by his confederate Brissot, was to represent this "_effervescence_" as another "_St. Bartholomew_" and speak of it as "_having made humanity shudder, and sullied the Revolution forever_."[4]