Such horrible events are sickening to relate; but as I started out to describe the condition of this “sea” when it became as the blood of a dead man, I must be faithful to the task.  God was now dethroned; the services of religion abandoned; every tenth day set apart for the hellish orgies of atheism and Reason; Marat was deified; the instrument of death sanctified by the name “the holy Guillotine”; on the public cemeteries was inscribed, “Death is an Eternal Sleep”; marriage was a civil contract, binding only during the pleasure of the contracting parties.  Mademoiselle Arnout, a celebrated comedian, expressed the public feeling when she said, “Marriage the sacrament of adultery.”  What an awful harvest would be expected of such seed!  Alison continues: 

“A Revolutionary Tribunal was formed at Nantes, under the direction of Carrier, and it soon outstripped even the rapid march of Danton and Robespierre.  Their principle was that it was necessary to destroy en masse, all the prisoners.  At their command was formed a corps, called the Legion of Marat, composed of the most determined and bloodthirsty of the revolutionists, the members of which were entitled, on their own authority, to incarcerate any person whom they chose.  The number of their prisoners was soon between three and four thousand, and they divided among themselves all their property.  Whenever a further supply of captives was wanted, the alarm was spread of a counter-revolution, the generale beat, the cannon planted; and this was followed immediately by innumerable arrests.  Nor were they long in disposing of their captives.  The miserable wretches were either slain with poinards in prison, or carried out in a vessel and drowned by wholesale in the Loire.  On one occasion a hundred ‘fanatical priests,’ as they were termed, were taken out together, striped of their clothes, and precipitated into the waters....  Women big with child, infants eight, nine, and ten years of age, were thrown together into the stream, on the sides of which men, armed with sabres, were placed to cut off their heads if the waves should throw them undrowned on the shore.

“On one occasion, by orders of Carrier, twenty-three of the revolutionists, on another twenty-four, were guillotined without any trial.  The executioner remonstrated, but in vain.  Among them were many children of seven or eight years of age, and seven women; the executioner died two or three days after, with horror at what he himself had done.  So great was the multitude of captives who were brought in on all sides, that the executioners, as well as the company of Marat, declared themselves exhausted with fatigue; and a new method of disposing of them was adopted, borrowed from Nero, but improved on the plan of that tyrant.  A hundred or a hundred and fifty victims, for the most part women and children, were crowded together in a boat, with a concealed trap-door in the bottom, which was conducted into the middle of