THE CORDELIERS.

ALONG with the national tribune, two others had been concurrently established; that of the Jacobins and that of the Cordeliers; the latter being at that time the most formidable, because it furnished members for the famous common council of Paris, and provided it with the means of action. Had the formation of this council not taken place, Paris, for want of a given point of concentration, would have become divided, and the different wards, with their local officers, been rival powers.

The club of the Cordeliers was established in the monastery of that name, the church of which had been built in the year 1259, in the reign of St. Louis, with money given as reparation for murder;* in 1590, it became the resort of the most celebrated adherents of the League.

There are places which appear to be the laboratory of factions. "Notice was given," says L'Estoile (July 12th, 1593,) "to the Duke de Mayenne, of two hundred Cordeliers having arrived in Paris, furnishing themselves with arms, and coming to an understanding with the Sixteen, who held their daily councils in the Cordeliers of Paris ... On that day the Sixteen, assembled at the Cordeliers, laid down their arms." Thus the fanatical leaguers had yielded up to our philosophical revolutionists the convent of the Cordeliers, as a dead-house.

The pictures, the sculptured or painted images, the veils and curtains of the convent, had been torn down; the church, stripped of its ornaments, presented nothing to the eye except its skeleton angles; in the apsis of the church, where the wind and the rain entered through the broken and unglazed windows, the workshop of a carpenter was made to serve as an office for the president, when the sittings were held in the church. In these workshops the red caps were laid aside, which every orator wore when he mounted the tribune to address the assembly. The tribune itself consisted of four small beams laid crosswise in the form of an X, supported by props, at whose intersections boards were laid down, like a scaffold. Behind the president stood a statue of Liberty, surrounded by the pretended instruments of ancient justice, then supplanted by a single bloody

It was burnt down in 1580.

machine, just as various complicated machinery has been supplanted by the hydraulic ram. The club of the exalted Jacobins borrowed some of its arrangements from the Cordeliers.

ORATORS.

THE orators of the clubs, united for destruction, had no common understanding either with respect to the chiefs to be chosen, or the means to be employed; they discoursed with beggars, pickpockets, robbers, and murderers, in the midst of the storms of hisses and hootings of these different groups of devils. Their metaphors were selected from the materials of murder, borrowed from the foulest objects of all kinds connected with the slaughter-house and the dunghill, or drawn from places appropriated to the prostitution of men and women. Their gesticulations made these objects sensible; every thing was called by its own name, with the cynicism of dogs, in an impious and obscene procession of oaths and blasphemies. In the midst of this savage cant with which the ears were assailed and stunned, nothing was to be gathered but the sounds of destruction and production, death and generation. The declaimers, with voices like hail-storms or thunder, were interrupted by others, besides their opponents. The small black daws of this convent without monks, and of the tower without bells, sported in and out of the broken windows, hoping for prey; and thus interrupted the speeches. They were at first called to order by the useless ringing of the president's bell; but not ceasing from their screeching, recourse was had to fire-arms to reduce them to silence; they fell palpitating and wounded, prophets of evil in the midst of the Pandemonium. Torn down timbers, rickety benches, dismantled stalls, and trunks of saints, rolled or pushed against the walls, served as standing places for the spectators, covered with dust and mud, drunk and sweating, with pikes over their shoulders, or their naked arms crossed.

The ugliest of the band always obtained a preference in obtaining leave to speak. All the infirmities both of body and mind played characters in our troubles: self-love disappointed has made great revolutionists.

MARAT AND HIS FRIENDS.

ACCORDING to this precedency of ugliness, a series of gorgon heads, mixed with the phantoms of the Sixteen, passed successively. The old physician of the Count D'Artois' body-guard, the Swiss dwarf Marat, with sabots or shoes shod with iron on his feet without stockings, was the first to deliver his oration, in virtue of his incontestable rights, Clothed with the office of fool, at the court of the people, he shouted, with his broad face and that simpering countenance of feudal politeness, which the old system of training gave to every face: "People, two hundred and seventy thousand heads must fall." This Caligula of the highways was followed by Chaumette, the atheist shoemaker. After the latter again came Camille Desmoulins, the attorney-general of the lamp-post. This stammering Cicero was the public councillor of murders, worn out with debauchery, the light-headed republican full of puns and witticisms, the jester upon the mumbling ceremonies of the cemetery, who declared that, in the massacres of September, all things had been done decently and in order. He consented to become a Spartan, provided the making of the black broth should be left to Méot the restaurateur.

man.

Fouché, having run up from Juilly and Nantes, studied the calamities of the times under these masters; in the circle of these ferocious beasts, listening attentively at the base of the tribune, he exhibited the appearance of a hyena dressed like a He scented the future out-pouring of blood; he already breathed the incense of processions of fools and executioners, awaiting the day on which, driven from the club of the Jacobins as a thief, an atheist, and an assassin, he should be selected as a minister of state. When Marat descended from the rostrum, this political Triboulet became the sport of his masters; they bantered him, trod upon his toes, and hooted at him, which, however, did not prevent him from becoming the leader of the multitude, from mounting to the belfry of the Hotel de Ville, sounding the tocsin of a general massacre, and triumphing at the revolutionary tribunal. Marat was overtaken by death; Chénier wrote his apotheosis; David painted him in his bloody bath; and he was compared to the divine author of the Gospel.

The following prayer was used in his honour :

"Heart of Jesus, heart of Marat; O sacred heart of Jesus, O sacred heart of Marat."

This heart of Marat was placed in a precious pyx, in a rich repository a cenotaph of gauze was erected on the Place du Carrousel, where the public went to visit the bust, the bath, the lamp, and writing-desk of the divinity. The wind, however, changed; the filth, poured from the agate urn into another vase, was emptied into the common sewer.

London, from April till September, 1822.

DANTON-CAMILLE DESMOULINS-FABRE D'EGLANTINE.

THE scenes at the Cordeliers, at which I was three or four times present, were ruled and presided over by Danton,-a Hun, with the stature of a Goth, flat-nosed, with wide nostrils, broad face, and the expression of a gendarme mingled with that of a slippery and cruel attorney. In the nave of his church, Danton with his three male furies, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, and Fabre d'Eglantine, organised the assassinations of September. Billaud de Varennes proposed to set fire to the prisons, and burn all who were within them; another member of the convention recommended drowning all who were in custody; Marat declared in favour of a general

massacre.

The author of the circular of the common council, he invited the friends of liberty to repeat in the departments the enormities perpetrated at the Carmelites and in the Abbaye.

Let us examine the page of history: Sixtus the fifth, for the salvation of mankind, compared the devotedness of Jaques Clement to the mystery of the incarnation, as Marat was compared to the Saviour of the world: Charles IX. wrote to the governors of the provinces to imitate the massacre of St. Bartholomew, as Danton gave orders to the patriots to take example by the murders of September. The Jacobins were plagiarists; they gave a proof of this by immolating Louis XVI. after the example of Charles I. As crimes are found mixed up

with great social movements, it has been most improperly represented that these crimes produced the great benefits of the revolution, of which they were only the hideous imitations ; impassioned or systematic minds admire nothing in a noble nature under suffering except the convulsion.

"We

Danton, more frank than the English, used to say, will not bring the king to trial, we will kill him :" and of the priests, he said, "These priests, these nobles, are not guilty, but they must be put to death, because they are out of their place, impede the course of events, and embarrass the future." This language has the appearance of a horrible depth, but it has no real character of genius; for it supposes innocence to be nothing, and that moral order may be separated from political order without destroying it, which is false.

He ac

Danton had no real conviction of the principles which he maintained; he merely wrapped himself up in the mantle of the revolution in order to make his fortune. "Come, bawl with us," was his advice to a young man; "when you have enriched yourself, then you can do as you please.” knowledged that he did not devote himself to the cause of the court, because they were unwilling to give his price; this was the effrontery of an intelligence acquainted with its own power, and of corruption proclaimed with open mouth.

Inferior, even in ugliness, to Mirabeau, whose agent he had been, Danton was superior to Robespierre, without having, like him, lent his name to crimes. He preserved some sense of religion: "We have not," said he, "destroyed superstition in order to establish atheism." His passions may have been good from the fact alone of their being passions. We ought always to pay some regard to the characters of men's minds in forming a judgment of their actions. Criminals of imaginative minds like Danton, from the very fact of the exaggeration of their sayings and deportment, appear more perversely wicked than those who are cold-blooded, although they are really less This remark, too, applies to a whole people; taken collectively, the people is the poet, author, and zealous actor in the piece in which it plays, or which it is made to play. Its excesses are not so much the instinct of a natural cruelty, as the delirium of a multitude inebriated with sights especially of a tragical nature; a thing so true, that in all

So.