The tocsin is pealing its loudest, the clocks inaudibly striking Three, when poor Abbe Sicard, with some thirty other Nonjurant Priests, in six carriages, fare along the streets, from their preliminary House of Detention at the Townhall, westward towards the Prison of the Abbaye.  Carriages enough stand deserted on the streets; these six move on,—­through angry multitudes, cursing as they move.  Accursed Aristocrat Tartuffes, this is the pass ye have brought us to!  And now ye will break the Prisons, and set Capet Veto on horseback to ride over us?  Out upon you, Priests of Beelzebub and Moloch; of Tartuffery, Mammon, and the Prussian Gallows,—­which ye name Mother-Church and God!  Such reproaches have the poor Nonjurants to endure, and worse; spoken in on them by frantic Patriots, who mount even on the carriage-steps; the very Guards hardly refraining.  Pull up your carriage-blinds!—­No! answers Patriotism, clapping its horny paw on the carriage blind, and crushing it down again.  Patience in oppression has limits:  we are close on the Abbaye, it has lasted long:  a poor Nonjurant, of quicker temper, smites the horny paw with his cane; nay, finding solacement in it, smites the unkempt head, sharply and again more sharply, twice over,—­seen clearly of us and of the world.  It is the last that we see clearly.  Alas, next moment, the carriages are locked and blocked in endless raging tumults; in yells deaf to the cry for mercy, which answer the cry for mercy with sabre-thrusts through the heart. (Felemhesi (anagram for Mehee Fils), La Verite tout entiere, sur les vrais auteurs de la journee du 2 Septembre 1792 (reprinted in Hist.  Parl. xviii. 156-181), p. 167.) The thirty Priests are torn out, are massacred about the Prison-Gate, one after one,—­only the poor Abbe Sicard, whom one Moton a watchmaker, knowing him, heroically tried to save, and secrete in the Prison, escapes to tell;—­and it is Night and Orcus, and Murder’s snaky-sparkling head has risen in the murk!—­

From Sunday afternoon (exclusive of intervals, and pauses not final) till Thursday evening, there follow consecutively a Hundred Hours.  Which hundred hours are to be reckoned with the hours of the Bartholomew Butchery, of the Armagnac Massacres, Sicilian Vespers, or whatsoever is savagest in the annals of this world.  Horrible the hour when man’s soul, in its paroxysm, spurns asunder the barriers and rules; and shews what dens and depths are in it!  For Night and Orcus, as we say, as was long prophesied, have burst forth, here in this Paris, from their subterranean imprisonment:  hideous, dim, confused; which it is painful to look on; and yet which cannot, and indeed which should not, be forgotten.