The manner of Paine's escape, as related by Carlyle, was as follows: "The tumbrils move on. But in this set of tumbrils there are two other things notable: one notable person; and one want of a notable person. The notable person is Lieu-tenant-General Loiserelles, a nobleman by birth and by nature; laying down his life for his son. In the prison of Saint-Lazare, the night before last, hurrying to the grate to hear the death-list read, he caught the name of his son. The son was asleep at the moment. 'I am Loiserelles,' cried the old man.... The want of the notable person, again, is that of Deputy Paine! Paine has set in the Luxembourg since January; and seemed forgotten; but Fouquier had pricked him at last. The turnkey, list in hand, is marking with chalk the outer doors of to-morrow's fournee. Paine's outer door happened to be open, turned back on the wall; the turnkey marked it on the side next him, and hurried on; another turnkey came and shut it; no chalkmark now visible, the fournee went without Paine. Paine's life lay not there." In a letter to Washington, Paine thus narrates the inhuman slaughter of his fellow-prisoners, from whose fate he so narrowly escaped: "The state of things in the prisons [for over four months] was a continued scene of horror. No man could count upon life for twenty-four hours. To such a pitch of rage and suspicion were Robespierre and his committee arrived, that it seemed as if they feared to leave a man to live. Scarcely a night passed in which ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more were not taken out of the prison, carried before a pretended tribunal in the morning, and guillotined before night. One hundred and sixty-nine were taken out of the Luxembourg one night in July, and one hundred and sixty of them guillotined, of whom I know I was to have been one. A list of two hundred more, according to the report in the prison, was preparing a few days before Robespierre fell. In this last list I have good reason to believe I was included." Concerning this reign of terror Guizot says: "Two thousand four hundred prisoners were registered in Paris on the books of the prison, at the moment of the deaths of the Girondins; three [four] months later, on the 1st of March, 1794, the number reached six thousand; on the 2d of May, eight thousand unfortunate persons waited for death. From June 10th to July 27th, two thousand, two hundred and eighty-five perished on the scaffold." (_History of France, Vol. VI, pp. 178, 196_.) Menzies says: "The queen, Marie Antoinette, her sister, Madame Elizabeth, Bailly, the Girondin chiefs, the Duke of Orleans, General Custine, Madame Roland, Lavoisier, Malesherbes, and a thousand other illustrious heads fell by the guillotine."