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The shop where Uncle Gradelle had accumulated his fortune, sou by sou, was a long, dark place, one of those suspicious looking pork butchers' shops of the old quarters of the city, where the well-worn flagstones retain a strong odour of meat in spite of constant washings.
These talked for some time with the Sieur de Jacqueville, Governor of Paris, who had joined the butchers' faction and was now riding at the head of the column, whereupon the force went no farther, but turned and retraced its steps. Guy wondered greatly where the butchers could be going, but soon found that they were making for the Bastille.
From under the benches, through the main entrance, under the loose side flaps, a rallying army sprang into being. Stake men, wagon men, cooks, hostlers, candy butchers, came flying from every direction. Every one of them had found a weapon a stake. Like skilled soldiers they grouped, and bore down on the intruders like an avalanche.
The knights, who were followed by some fifty men-at-arms, rode into the mob, hewing them down with their swords. The humiliations that they had received from the arrogance and insolence of the butchers had long rankled in their minds, and they now took a heavy vengeance.
Horrible as it seems, the taste for it is soon acquired; and certainly the good results warrant at least the effort to acquire it. VENISON comes next in the order of meats, but is more like game than any ordinary butchers' meat. It is lean, dark in color, and savory, and if well cooked, very digestible.
The butchers of human flesh continued in the interior of the Temple, parading the triumph of their assassination, until the shrieks of the Princesse Elizabeth at the state in which she saw the Queen, and serious fears for the safety of the royal prisoners, aroused the commandant to treble the national guards and chase the barbarians to the outside, where they remained for hours.
She snatched at all sorts of knowledge, talked over butchers, and bakers, and house expenses, and Kingcombe ways of marketing, taking an interest in the most commonplace things. For pervading everything was the consciousness, "It is his home I have to make comfortable." That thought sanctified and beautified all.
Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated; the field of politics supplies the alchemists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction.
And their butchers had no mercy. They could think only of their past wrongs, and of satiating the thirst for vengeance, which had grown to a madness by previous restraint. "There's for thirteen years of misery," cries one, driving his spike into the heart of one. "Take that for hanging of my brother," screams a second, cleaving a Moor's skull with his hatchet.
Their first business was very soon accomplished, as the butchers, to whom Mr Strelley's beasts were well-known, looked forward to supply themselves regularly from those which were brought to them by his drovers.
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