Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not mentioned among the other miracles of tanning!  ‘At Meudon,’ says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, ’there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying:  of which perfectly good wash-leather was made:’  for breeches, and other uses.  The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality to shamoy; that of women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture! (Montgaillard, iv. 290.)—­History looking back over Cannibalism, through Purchas’s Pilgrims and all early and late Records, will perhaps find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort on the whole so detestable.  It is a manufactured, soft-feeling, quietly elegant sort; a sort perfide!  Alas then, is man’s civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?  Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial.

BOOK 3.VI.

THERMIDOR

Chapter 3.6.I.

The Gods are athirst.

What then is this Thing, called La Revolution, which, like an Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading, fighting, gun-boring, tanning human skins?  La Revolution is but so many Alphabetic Letters; a thing nowhere to be laid hands on, to be clapt under lock and key:  where is it? what is it?  It is the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men.  In this man it is, and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men.  Invisible, impalpable; and yet no black Azrael, with wings spread over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could be a truer Reality.

To explain, what is called explaining, the march of this Revolutionary Government, be no task of ours.  Men cannot explain it.  A paralytic Couthon, asking in the Jacobins, ’what hast thou done to be hanged if the Counter-Revolution should arrive;’ a sombre Saint-Just, not yet six-and-twenty, declaring that ’for Revolutionists there is no rest but in the tomb;’ a seagreen Robespierre converted into vinegar and gall; much more an Amar and Vadier, a Collot and Billaud:  to inquire what thoughts, predetermination or prevision, might be in the head of these men!  Record of their thought remains not; Death and Darkness have swept it out utterly.  Nay if we even had their thought, all they could have articulately spoken to us, how insignificant a fraction were that of the Thing which realised itself, which decreed itself, on signal given by them!  As has been said more than once, this Revolutionary Government is not a self-conscious but a blind fatal one.  Each man, enveloped in his ambient-atmosphere of revolutionary fanatic Madness, rushes on, impelled and impelling; and has become a blind brute Force; no rest for him but in the grave!  Darkness and the mystery of horrid cruelty cover it for us, in History; as they