city. Twice was I compelled to leave the house, and on both occasions did I find the streets deserted and silent. The assassins had lost their accustomed spirit of bravado. Public grief made itself felt, and they were silent in the face of it."
X.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
One cannot help breathing hard while reading, amid all its baldness, many passages of this work, and especially those which give us pictures of the Reign of Terror. Poor young Pasquier had abundant opportunity of realising all the perils of that terrible time. Nearly all the old members of the Paris Parliament were classed as aristocrats and reactionaries; and to have been one of them, unless Revolutionary fervour or atrocities came as a defence and an obliteration, amounted to a certainty of imprisonment, and an almost equal certainty of condemnation and death.
Pasquier's father was arrested with many of his colleagues, and was ultimately guillotined. Nothing can give a better idea of the horrors of the time than the simple narrative which Pasquier unfolds of his father's and his own adventures at this epoch. Here, for instance, is a curious picture of the state of mind which constant peril produced—the feeling that im-
