through an old townsman—Levasseur, a Revolutionary leader, whom Pasquier and his family had known in happier days—partly again through female agency. Petticoats and the tumbril—a woman's smiles, blandishments, appeals to the family affection and sexual love of these unchained tigers on the one side; and the cold relentlessness of the Revolutionary tribunals and the constant swish of the guillotine on the other—it is only France which could produce a combination so grotesque, appalling, ironic.
XIII.
STILL THE REIGN OF TERROR.
I must give one or two other pictures of the Reign of Terror before I go on to another section of Pasquier's Memoirs. The very acidity and almost brutal terseness of the style help to increase one's sense of the horrors of the time. After the escape to which I have already alluded, Pasquier once more buried himself in the provinces. Here came the dreadful news that his father had been guillotined, and many others who had been friends and colleagues:
"I spent two months of mental suffering in the locality where I had received the awful news. It was, I can never forget it, in the midst of some of the first days of a beautiful spring. All these dreadful misdeeds were being perpetrated with
