Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/221

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TERRORISTS.
201

and slunk home. In September 1792 he was one of the butchers of unarmed prisoners. What became of him we do not hear.

Among the revolutionary judges in the provinces were two men apparently of British extraction. Duplessis-Smith, in Finistère, endeavoured in May 1794 to save from the scaffold twenty members of the former Girondin local administration, but his efforts were unavailing. O'Brien, at St. Malo, was more successful in securing the acquittal of six children—two of them only five years old, the others between eight and ten. To such lengths had the Terror gone that even children were not safe. Well might a caricature, seized by the St. Denis municipality and forwarded to Robespierre, represent him as seated on a sarcophagus inscribed, "Noblesse, clergé, Girondins, Hébertistes, peuple," Robespierre and the executioner the only survivors, and Robespierre preparing to guillotine the executioner.