To be cheerful, happy, and joyous, seemed now to the Parisians the highest duty of life, and every thing was made subservient to it.  The people had wept and mourned so long, that now, to shake off this oppressive heaviness of mind, they rushed with fanatical precipitancy into pleasure; they gave themselves up to the wildest orgies and bacchanals, and without disgust or shame abandoned themselves to the most immoral conduct.  All tears were dried up as if by magic; honest poverty began to be ashamed of itself; and the wealth so carefully hid until now, was again brought to light; even those who in the days of revolutionary terror had become rich through the property of the sacrificed victims, exposed themselves to public gaze with impunity and without shame.  They plundered and adorned themselves with a wealth acquired only through cunning, treachery, and murder.  Everywhere feasts, banquets, and balls, were organized; and it was an ordinary event to find in the same company the accuser and the accused, the executioner and his victim, the murderer near the daughter of the man whose head he had given over to the guillotine!

This was especially the case at the so-called victim balls (bals a la victime) which were given by the heirs, the sons and fathers of those who had perished by the guillotine.  People gathered together in brilliant entertainments and balls to the honor and memory of the executed ones.  Every one who could pay the large fee of admission to these bals a la victime were permitted to enter.  Those who came there, not for pleasure, but to honor their dead, showed this intention by their clothing, and especially by the arrangement of their hair.  To remind them that those who had been led to the guillotine had had their hair cut close, gentlemen now had theirs cut short, and the dressing of the hair a la victime was for gentlemen as much a fashion as the dressing of the hair a la Titus (the Roman emperor) was for the ladies.  Besides this, the heirs of the victims wore some token of the departed ones, and ladies and gentlemen were seen in the blood-stained garments which their relatives had worn on their way to the scaffold, and which they had purchased with large sums of money from the executioner, that lord of Paris.  It often happened that a lady in the blood-stained dress of her mother danced with the son of the man who had delivered her mother to the guillotine; that a son of a member of the Convention of 1793 led, in the minuet, the graceful “pas de chale,” with the daughter of an emigrant marquis.  The most fanatical men of the days of terror, now exalted into wealthy land-owners, led on in the gay waltz the daughters of their former landlords; and these women pressed the hand soiled with the blood of their relatives because now, as amends for their traffic in blood, they could offer future wealth and distinction.

It seemed that all Paris and all France had gone mad—­that the whole nation was drunk with blood as with intoxicating wine, and wanted to stifle the voice of conscience in the horrible revelry of the saturnalia.