INTRODUCTION
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their wealth on the day of 9 Thermidor. The gilded rabble put in its appearance; the ladies of the good and new society celebrated the death of the fallen men with orgies and surrounded the death-cart with wild gestures of delight, for this cart was bearing to the guillotine the first revolutionary government of the world. It was a generation of youth, which had grown up in the nation's greatest days. Saint-Just, the youngest of these republicans doomed to death, was twenty-seven years old; the ls was thirty-seven years of age.
