* But if they did not free the enemies of each other, they revenged themselves by throwing into prison all their mutual friends—­for the temper of the times was such, that, though these Representatives were expressly invested with unlimited powers, they did not venture to set any one at liberty without a multitude of forms and a long attendance:  on the contrary, they arrested without any form at all, and allowed their myrmidons to harrass and confine the persons and sequester the property of all whom they judged proper.—­It seemed to have been an elementary principle with those employed by the government at this time, that they risked nothing in doing all the mischief they could, and that they erred only in not doing enough.

—­All, therefore, that can be obtained is, a promise to have us removed to Amiens in a short time; and I understand the detenus are there treated with consideration, and that no tribunal revolutionnaire has yet been established.

My mind will be considerably more at ease if this removal can be effected.  Perhaps we may not be in more real danger here than at any other place, but it is not realities that constitute the misery of life; and situated as we are, that imagination must be phlegmatic indeed, which does not create and exaggerate enough to prevent the possibility of ease.—­We are, as I before observed, placed as it were within the jurisdiction of the guillotine; and I have learned “a secret of our prison-house” to-day which Mad. de ____ had hitherto concealed from me, and which has rendered me still more anxious to quit it.  Several of our fellow prisoners, whom I supposed only transferred to other houses, have been taken away to undergo the ceremony of a trial, and from thence to the scaffold.  These judicial massacres are now become common, and the repetition of them has destroyed at once the feeling of humanity and the sense of justice.  Familiarized to executions, the thoughtless and sanguinary people behold with equal indifference the guilty or innocent victim; and the Guillotine has not only ceased to be an object of horror, but is become almost a source of amusement.

* At Arras this horrid instrument of death was what they called en permanence, (stationary,) and so little regard was paid to the morals of the people, (I say the morals, because every thing which tends to destroy their humanity renders them vicious,) that it was often left from one execution to another with the ensanguined traces of the last victim but too evident.—­Children were taught to amuse themselves by making models of the Guillotine, with which they destroyed flies, and even animals.  On the Pontneuf, at Paris, a sort of puppet-show was exhibited daily, whose boast it was to give a very exact imitation of a guillotinage; and the burthen of a popular song current for some months was "Dansons la Guillotine." —­On the 21st of January, 1794, the anniversary of the King’s death, the Convention