Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/183

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As Napoleon appeared to a Relative.
167

drawn there by curiosity, and were perhaps more execrable than the executioners; for though they dared neither go away nor take part in the horrid deed, still they applauded. I looked forward, and at sight of a heap of bodies still palpitating with life, I uttered a cry of horror. Two men turned round, and, taking me abruptly by the collar, dragged me violently to the street, where they reproached me with imprudence, and then, running away, left me alone in the dark. The horrible spectacle I had witnessed deprived me of all courage; I went home overwhelmed with shame and despair for humanity so execrably injured, and the French character so deplorably disgraced."

I call this remarkable, because the number of the persons who took part in the massacre is put down at as low a figure as fifty; all the rest are spectators. But what follows is still stranger—confirming the statement which students of the Revolution have often heard—that Paris, outside a very restricted area, practically remained pretty much the same during the very worst times of the Revolution:

"The particulars of the massacre having all been recorded in the memoirs of the time, I need not repeat them here. I was, moreover, no spectator of them. They lasted three days, and—I blush while I write it—at half a mile from the different prisons nobody would have imagined