The shock had been awful, but it was directly traceable to the accumulated disorders of Jacobin rule. A rude and vigorous but eerie order of things had been inaugurated on November twenty-fourth, 1793, by the so-called republic. There was first the new calendar, in which the year I began on September twenty-second, 1792, the day on which the republic had been proclaimed. In it were the twelve thirty-day months, with their names of vintage, fog, and frost; of snow, rain, and wind; of bud, flower, and meadow; of seed, heat, and harvest: the whole terminated most unpoetically by the five or six supplementary days named sansculot-tides,--sansculottes meaning without knee-breeches, a garment confined to the upper classes; that is, with long trousers like the common people,--and these days were so named because they were to be a holiday for the long-trousered populace which was to use the new reckoning. There was next the new, strange, and unhallowed spectacle, seen in history for the first time, the realization of a nightmare--a whole people finally turned into an army, and at war with nearly all the world. The reforming Girondists had created the situation, and the Jacobins, with grim humor, were unflinchingly facing the logical consequences of such audacity. Carnot had given the watchword of attack in mass and with superior numbers; the times gave the frenzied courage of sentimental exaltation. Before the end of 1793 the foreign enemies of France, though not conquered, had been checked on the frontier; the outbreak of civil war in Vendée had been temporarily suppressed; both Lyons and Toulon had been retaken.