Page:History of the Guillotine.djvu/77

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62
ESSAY ON THE GUILLOTINE.

artfully superadded, the massacres commenced, and both the MM. de Montmorln perished—the Marquis at La Force, and the Count at the Abbaye,—with many hundred others as innocent as they; and Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Egalité, Osselin the first President of the Tribunal, and their atrocious associates, were elected, without a dissentient voice, representatives of the city of Paris—all to be massacred in their turns, by their mutual animosities and the retributive justice of Heaven.

On the very days of the massacres, the Tribunal, terrified like the rest of Paris, condemned two persons who would probably have been also acquitted a day or two before. One was a Swiss officer of the name of Bachman—why singled out for trial, or for what offence, does not appear; the other a poor waggoner, who, having been sentenced to exposition (a kind of pillory) for some minor offence, had exclaimed, "Vive le Roi!—Vive M. Lafayette!—a fig for the nation!" The massacres had for the moment deprived the tribunal of its natural aliment; and the only other political execution we find about this time is that of old Cazotte, the poet, who, at the age of seventy-four years, had been arrested on account of some private letters of his to La Porte, his old and intimate friend, found in the possession of the latter. He had been thrown into prison, and was about to perish in the massacres of September, when he was saved by the courage and piety of his daughter, who exposed her own person to the pikes of the assassins, and actually awed and