He is not ashamed to call the murder of the
unhappy priests in the Carmes, who were under no criminal denunciation
whatsoever, a "_vengeance_ mingled with a _sort of justice_"; he
observes that they "had been a long time spared by the sword of the
law," and calls by anticipation all those who should represent this
"_effervescence_" in other colors _villains and traitors_: he did not
than foresee how soon himself and his accomplices would be under the
necessity of assuming the pretended character of this new sort of
"_villany and treason_", in the hope of obliterating the memory of their
former real _villanies and treasons_; he did not foresee that in the
course of six months a formal manifesto on the part of himself and his
faction, written by his confederate Brissot, was to represent this
"_effervescence_" as another "_St. Bartholomew_" and speak of it as
"_having made humanity shudder, and sullied the Revolution forever_."[4]
It is very remarkable that he takes upon himself to know the motives of
the assassins, their policy, and even what they "believed." How could
this be, if he had no connection with them? He praises the murderers for
not having taken as yet _all_ the lives of those who had, as he calls
it, "_presented themselves_ as victims to their fury." He paints the
miserable prisoners, who had been forcibly piled upon one another in
the Church of the Carmelites by his faction, as _presenting themselves_
as victims to their fury,--as if death was their choice, or (allowing
the idiom of his language to make this equivocal) as if they were by
some accident _presented_ to the fury of their assassins: whereas he
knew that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocent
victims in the places where they had deposited them and were sure to
find them.
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