I say little of my own feelings; they are not of a nature to be relieved by pathetic expressions:  “I am e’en sick at heart.”  For some time I have struggled both against my own evils, and the share I take in the general calamity, but my mortal part gives way, and I can no longer resist the despondency which at times depresses me, and which indeed, more than the danger attending it, has occasioned my abandoning my pen for the last month.—­Several circumstances have occurred within these few days, to add to the uneasiness of our situation, and my own apprehensions.  Le Bon,* whose cruelties at Arras seem to have endeared him to his colleagues in the Convention, has had his powers extended to this department, and Andre Dumont is recalled; so that we are hourly menaced with the presence of a monster, compared to whom our own representative is amiable.—­

* I have already noticed the cruel and ferocious temper of Le Bon, and the massacres of his tribunals are already well known.  I will only add some circumstances which not only may be considered as characteristic of this tyrant, but of the times—­and I fear I may add of the people, who suffered and even applauded them.  They are selected from many others not susceptible of being described in language fit for an English reader.

As he was one day enjoying his customary amusement of superintending an execution, where several had already suffered, one of the victims having, from a very natural emotion, averted his eyes while he placed his body in the posture required, the executioner perceived it, and going to the sack which contained the heads of those just sacrificed, took one out, and with the most horrible imprecations obliged the unhappy wretch to kiss it:  yet Le Bon not only permitted, but sanctioned this, by dining daily with the hangman.  He was afterwards reproached with this familiarity in the Convention, but defended himself by saying, “A similar act of Lequinio’s was inserted by your orders in the bulletin with ‘honourable mention;’ and your decrees have invariably consecrated the principles on which I acted.”  They all felt for a moment the dominion of conscience, and were silent.—­On another occasion he suspended an execution, while the savages he kept in pay threw dirt on the prisoners, and even got on the scaffold and insulted them previous to their suffering.

When any of his colleagues passed through Arras, he always proposed their joining with him in a "partie de Guillotine," and the executions were perpetrated on a small square at Arras, rather than the great one, that he, his wife, and relations might more commodiously enjoy the spectacle from the balcony of the theatre, where they took their coffee, attended by a band of music, which played while this human butchery lasted.

The following circumstance, though something less horrid, yet sufficiently so to excite the indignation of feeling people, happened