butcheries, a kind of infernal Tribunal was at last instituted in a gloomy vault, with self-appointed judge and jury, where Maillard, dread arbiter of September, sat with book and inkstand before him to try culprits, pronounce judgments, acquit a few, and send the mass to destruction. In this carnival of death there were some deeds over which history, in mercy to mankind, should draw the veil, as the cruel murder and dastardly usage of the Princess de Lamballe, whose head, severed from the body, was stuck on a pike and paraded by a wretch through the streets of Paris, and in front of the Temple itself, before the sickened eyes of Louis XVI. There were also deeds of devotion and filial heroism such as humanise these otherwise demoniacal proceedings. Thus Mademoiselle de Sombreuil saved her father's life by enfolding him in her arms and making her body a rampart for him; she even disarmed the murderers by her courage, beauty, and despair. But, not content with the actual horrors of the scene, historians have not scrupled to add to them, and the story that the unhappy girl was forced to drink a tumbler of blood to redeem her father is proved to have grown out of the fact that, on having fainted, one of the ferocious band hurried to bring a glass of water, into which, as she took it, there fell a drop of blood from his sanguinary hand.
These "bacchanals of blood" lasted from three to four days and nights. Prison after prison was invaded and emptied of its human contents; the appetite seemed to grow with what it fed upon; the massacres became more indiscriminate as they proceeded. And was there no power in Paris to arrest this defilement of the cause of freedom? Alas! the power in whose hands the real authority, and not its
