My dear Saint Hannah, I have frequently been going to write to you, but checked myself.  You are so good and so bad, that I feared I should interrupt some act of benevolence on one side; and on the other that you would not answer my letter in three months.  I am glad to find, as an Irishman would say, that the way to make you answer is not to speak first.  But, ah! i am a brute to upbraid any moment of your silence, though I regretted it when I hear that your kind intentions have been prevented by frequent cruel pain! and that even your rigid abstemiousness does not remove your complaints.  Your heart is always aching for others, and your head for yourself.  Yet the latter never hinders the activity of the former.  What must your tenderness not feel now, when a whole nation of monsters is burst forth?  The second massacre of Paris has exhibited horrors that even surpass the former.(840) Even the Queen’s women were butchered in the Thuilleries, and the tigers chopped of the heads from the dead bodies, and tossed them into the flames of the palace.  The tortures of the poor King and Queen, from the length of"their duration, surpass all example; and the brutal insolence with which they were treated on the 10th, all invention.  They were dragged through the Place Vendome to see the statue of Louis the Fourteenth in fragments, and told it was to be the King’s fate; and he, the most harmless of men, was told he is a monster; and this, after three years of sufferings.  King and Queen, and children were shut up in a room, without nourishment, for twelve hours.  One who was a witness has come over, and says he found the Queen sitting on the floor, trembling like an aspen in every limb, and her sweet boy the Dauphin asleep against her knee!  She has not one woman to attend her that ever she saw, but a companion of her misery, the King’s sister, an heroic virgin saint, who, on the former irruption into the palace, flew to and clung to her brother, and being mistaken for the Queen, and the hellish fiends wishing to murder her, and somebody aiming to undeceive them, she said, “Ah! ne les d`etrompez pas!"(841) Was not that sentence the sublime of innocence?  But why do I wound your thrilling nerves with the relation of such horrible scenes?  Your blackmanity(842) must allow some of its tears to these poor victims.  For my part, I have an abhorrence of politics, if one can so term these tragedies, which make one harbour sentiments one naturally abhors; but can one refrain without difficulty from exclaiming such wretches should be exterminated?  They have butchered hecatombs of Swiss, even to porters in private houses, because they often are, and always are called, Le Suisse.  Think on fifteen hundred persons, probably more, butchered on the 10th,(843) in the space of eight hours.  Think on premiums voted for the assassination of several princes, and do not think that such execrable proceedings have been confined to Paris; no, Avignon, Marseilles, etc. are still smoking with blood!  Scarce the Alecto of the North, the legislatress and the usurper of Poland, has occasioned the spilling of larger torrents!