In the midst of this carnage he thinks of nothing but throwing a veil over it,—­which was at once to cover the guilty from punishment, and to extinguish all compassion for the sufferers.  He apologizes for it; in fact, he justifies it.  He who (as the reader has just seen in what is quoted from this letter) feels so much indignation at “vague denunciations,” when made against himself, and from which he then feared nothing more than the subversion of his power, is not ashamed to consider the charge of a conspiracy to massacre the Parisians, brought against his master upon denunciations as vague as possible, or rather upon no denunciations, as a perfect justification of the monstrous proceedings against him.  He is not ashamed to call the murder of the unhappy priests in the Carmes, who were under no criminal denunciation whatsoever, a “vengeance mingled with a sort of justice”; he observes that they “had been a long time spared by the sword of the law,” and calls by anticipation all those who should represent this “effervescence” in other colors villains and traitors:  he did not than foresee how soon himself and his accomplices would be under the necessity of assuming the pretended character of this new sort of “villany and treason”, in the hope of obliterating the memory of their former real villanies and treasons; he did not foresee that in the course of six months a formal manifesto on the part of himself and his faction, written by his confederate Brissot, was to represent this “effervescence” as another “St. Bartholomew” and speak of it as “having made humanity shudder, and sullied the Revolution forever."[4]

It is very remarkable that he takes upon himself to know the motives of the assassins, their policy, and even what they “believed.”  How could this be, if he had no connection with them?  He praises the murderers for not having taken as yet all the lives of those who had, as he calls it, “presented themselves as victims to their fury.”  He paints the miserable prisoners, who had been forcibly piled upon one another in the Church of the Carmelites by his faction, as presenting themselves as victims to their fury,—­as if death was their choice, or (allowing the idiom of his language to make this equivocal) as if they were by some accident presented to the fury of their assassins:  whereas he knew that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocent victims in the places where they had deposited them and were sure to find them.  The very selection, which he praises as a sort of justice tempering their fury, proves beyond a doubt the foresight, deliberation, and method with which this massacre was made.  He knew that circumstance on the very day of the commencement of the massacres, when, in all probability, he had begun this letter,—­for he presented it to the Assembly on the very next.