a freer field for cabal. In the latter days of August were made numberless arrests of nobles, recalcitrant priests, and citizens of dubious patriotism—as many as five thousand being seized in one night. The Abbaye, St. Pelagie, the Conciergerie, and other prisons—or convents suddenly turned into such—were full to overflowing.
On the 2nd of September 1792 the inhabitants of Paris were wrought up to a fever-heat of excitement. The air was full of farewells to the volunteers departing for the frontiers; the muffled roll of drums filled the air; an enormous black flag waving from the Town Hall seemed to prognosticate destruction and death; the clatter of horses and arms, seized in the nation's name, was heard as they were being taken to the gates; the alarm-bells were pealing; volleys of cannon thundered in quicker and quicker succession; the desperate looks of the people, the sinister rumours afloat—everything foreboded the outbreak of some imminent catastrophe.
Was it the premeditated act of the Commune? Had it been engendered in the monstrous imagination of Marat? Or had Danton—with his famous, "Let my name be branded and my memory perish, if only France be free!"—aimed the first blow? Or, again, did the Paris mob of its own accord turn upon its prisoners, vowing that not a Royalist should survive to triumph, if the enemy entered its walls? Each successive historian of the French Revolution, from Michelet to Lamartine and Louis Blanc, has assigned the hideous responsibility of the September massacres to different sets of men. But there is sometimes a fatal conjunction of circumstances in which distinct causes work darkly towards the same events, and it
