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It is secondary strength, not innate but acquired, of which the finest instance is a matter of history, and was witnessed within the walls of the Conciergerie during the Reign of Terror, where men and women unflinchingly carried on a hollow semblance of the joyous comedy of life till they mounted laughing into the tumbrils.
Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. Six tumbrils roll along the streets.
The Convention then must be purged, with aid of Henriot. But next day, amid cries of Tyranny! Dictatorship! the Convention decrees that Robespierre "is accused"; with Couthon and St. Just; decreed "out of law"; Paris, after brief tumult, sides with the Convention. So on July 28, 1794, the tumbrils go with this motley batch of outlaws. This is the end of the Reign of Terror.
At times even now I can conjure up a vision of the broad, sombre Petrograd streets, with the dull cotton-wool sky pressing down almost on to the house-tops; the vast silent crowds thronging the thoroughfares, and the tumbrils rolling slowly forward through the crowded streets to the place of execution, accompanied by the gay strains of the march from Fatinitza.
He looked at her a moment with a glance that was almost of surprise, then, with a slight compression of the lips and the faintest raising of the shoulders, he turned from her and strode over to the window. There was a considerable concourse of people on their way to the Place de la Republique, for the hour of the tumbrils was at hand.
British readers of my story will express surprise at these terms, but I assure them that not only these articles but tumbrils, guillotines, and conciergeries were in active use among the Federals. If substantiation be required, I refer to the Charleston Mercury, the only reliable organ, next to the New York Daily News, published in the country.
Behind came his gallant train, and with tumbrils and sumpter-mules laden with baggage, and enriched by Edward's gifts; while Welch hawks, and steeds of great price from the pastures of Surrey and the plains of Cambridge and York, attested no less acceptably than zimme, and golden chain, and embroidered robe, the munificence of the grateful King.
A vision of leaping tumbrils, and long marching columns about to deploy, passed before his eyelids: he thought he had fallen on the battle-field, and heard a drum beat furiously in the back of his head; and on streamed the cavalry, wonderfully caught away to such a distance that the figures were all diminutive, and the regimental colours swam in smoke, and the enemy danced a plume here and there out of the sea, while his mother and a forgotten Viennese girl gazed at him with exactly the same unfamiliar countenance, and refused to hear that they were unintelligible in the roaring of guns and floods and hurrahs, and the thumping of the tremendous big drum behind his head 'somewhere in the middle of the earth': he tried to explain the locality of that terrible drumming noise to them, and Vittoria conceived him to be delirious; but he knew that he was sensible; he knew her and Angelo and the mountain-pass, and that he had a cigar-case in his pocket worked in embroidery of crimson, blue, and gold, by the hands of Countess Anna.
It was the first on the list to-day. Without a word he walked into the dark passage, noticing none of the others who waited there, some pale and afraid, some as though they were starting upon a journey of pleasure. "One, two, three tumbrils! The guillotine was hungry this morning. Raymond Latour was in the last tumbril. "I was promised life I told all I knew there is a mistake. Ask!
His humour was one of pitying patience for a girl that had not the wit to see that to ask him the most noble d'Ombreval to die that La Boulaye might live was very much like asking him to sacrifice his life to save a dog's. It wanted but a few minutes to noon as the condemned of the day were being brought out of the Conciergerie to take their places in the waiting tumbrils.
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