He does not so much as pretend that he had used any force to put
a stop to it. But if he had used any, the sanction given under his hand
to a sort of justice in the murderers was enough to disarm the
protecting force.
That approbation of what they had already done had its natural effect on
the executive assassins, then in the paroxysm of their fury, as well as
on their employers, then in the midst of the execution of their
deliberate, cold-blooded system of murder. He did not at all differ from
either of them in the principle of those executions, but only in the
time of their duration,--and that only as it affected himself. This,
though to him a great consideration, was none to his confederates, who
were at the same time his rivals. They were encouraged to accomplish the
work they had in hand. They did accomplish it; and whilst this grave
moral epistle from a grave minister, recommending a cessation of their
work of "vengeance mingled with a sort of justice," was before a grave
assembly, the authors of the massacres proceeded without interruption in
their business for four days together,--that is, until the seventh of
that month, and until all the victims of the first proscription in Paris
and at Versailles and several other places were immolated at the shrine
of the grim Moloch of liberty and equality. All the priests, all the
loyalists, all the first essayists and novices of revolution in 1789,
that could be found, were promiscuously put to death.
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