Behold!  Representative Fouche, it is Fouche of Nantes, a name to become well known; he with a Patriot company goes duly, in wondrous Procession, to raise the corpse of Chalier.  An Ass, housed in Priest’s cloak, with a mitre on its head, and trailing the Mass-Books, some say the very Bible, at its tail, paces through Lyons streets; escorted by multitudinous Patriotism, by clangour as of the Pit; towards the grave of Martyr Chalier.  The body is dug up and burnt:  the ashes are collected in an Urn; to be worshipped of Paris Patriotism.  The Holy Books were part of the funeral pile; their ashes are scattered to the wind.  Amid cries of “Vengeance!  Vengeance!”—­which, writes Fouche, shall be satisfied. (Moniteur (du 17 Novembre 1793), &c.)

Lyons in fact is a Town to be abolished; not Lyons henceforth but ‘Commune Affranchie, Township Freed;’ the very name of it shall perish.  It is to be razed, this once great City, if Jacobinism prophesy right; and a Pillar to be erected on the ruins, with this Inscription, Lyons rebelled against the Republic; Lyons is no more.  Fouche, Couthon, Collot, Convention Representatives succeed one another:  there is work for the hangman; work for the hammerman, not in building.  The very Houses of Aristocrats, we say, are doomed.  Paralytic Couthon, borne in a chair, taps on the wall, with emblematic mallet, saying, “La Loi te frappe, The Law strikes thee;” masons, with wedge and crowbar, begin demolition.  Crash of downfall, dim ruin and dust-clouds fly in the winter wind.  Had Lyons been of soft stuff, it had all vanished in those weeks, and the Jacobin prophecy had been fulfilled.  But Towns are not built of soap-froth; Lyons Town is built of stone.  Lyons, though it rebelled against the Republic, is to this day.

Neither have the Lyons Girondins all one neck, that you could despatch it at one swoop.  Revolutionary Tribunal here, and Military Commission, guillotining, fusillading, do what they can:  the kennels of the Place des Terreaux run red; mangled corpses roll down the Rhone.  Collot d’Herbois, they say, was once hissed on the Lyons stage:  but with what sibilation, of world-catcall or hoarse Tartarean Trumpet, will ye hiss him now, in this his new character of Convention Representative,—­not to be repeated!  Two hundred and nine men are marched forth over the River, to be shot in mass, by musket and cannon, in the Promenade of the Brotteaux.  It is the second of such scenes; the first was of some Seventy.  The corpses of the first were flung into the Rhone, but the Rhone stranded some; so these now, of the second lot, are to be buried on land.  Their one long grave is dug; they stand ranked, by the loose mould-ridge; the younger of them singing the Marseillaise.  Jacobin National Guards give fire; but have again to give fire, and again; and to take the bayonet and the spade, for though the doomed all fall, they do not all die;—­and it becomes a butchery too horrible for speech.  So that the very Nationals, as they fire, turn away their faces.  Collot, snatching the musket from one such National, and levelling it with unmoved countenance, says “It is thus a Republican ought to fire.”