Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/181

than promises could have done, and by twelve o'clock the frightful procession set off. I hope such a scene will never be witnessed again. I have often asked myself how the metropolis of a nation so celebrated for urbanity and elegance of manners, how the brilliant city of Paris could contain the savage hordes I that day beheld, and who so long reigned over it! In walking through the streets of Paris, it seems to me, the features even of the lowest and most miserable class of people do not present to the eye anything like ferociousness, or the meanest passions in all their hideous energy. Can those passions alter the features so as to deprive them of all likeness to humanity? or does the terror inspired by the sight of a guilty wretch give him the semblance of a wild beast? These madmen, dancing in the mire and covered with mud, surrounded the King's coach. The groups that marched foremost carried on long pikes the bloody and dishevelled heads of the Life Guards butchered in the morning. Surely Satan himself first invented the placing of a human head at the end of a lance. The disfigured and pale features, the gory locks, the half-open mouth, the closed eyes, images of death, added to the gestures and salutations the executioners made them perform, in horrible mockery of life, presented the most frightful spectacle rage could have imagined. A troop of women, ugly as