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Already the wind had aroused the sea to its old warfare against the rocks and strands. Its hollow roaring was borne far inland. For a time the little party walked in silence. The Comtesse was the first to speak. "If that is the way your loyal troops behave, Maurice, I think that I prefer the sans culottes. Ugh! my clothes are half torn off my back. I shall never be able to wear this dress again.
Gouverneur Morris, American minister to the court of Louis XVI, was considerably enriched, at the close of the reign of terror, by plate, jewels, furniture, paintings, coaches, and so on, left in his charge by members of the French nobility, that they might not be confiscated in the sack of the city by the sans culottes; for so many of the aristocracy were killed and so many went into exile or disguised their names, that it was impossible to find heirs or owners for these effects.
They decreed the law of the maximum, and it merely increased the evils it was intended to remedy. Robespierre declared before the Convention ``that all the sans- culottes will be paid at the expense of the public treasury, which will be fed by the rich, and in spite of requisitions and the guillotine the treasury remained empty.
The Postmaster told us what he could, which was not much; the only curious part was that in his narrative he never called the Highland Regiments "Les Écossais," but "Les Sans Culottes." The setting sun found us all covered with dust, rather tired and very hungry, and driving up, with some misgivings from what we had heard and from what we saw, to our Inn at Charleroi.
Dietrich, aided by the great majority of the citizens of Strasburg, long succeeded in keeping the sans culottes at bay, but was at length overcome, deprived of his office, and guillotined at Paris, while Eulogius Schneider, who had formerly been a professor at Bonn, then court preacher to the Catholic duke, Charles of Wurtemberg, became the tyrant of Strasburg, and, in the character of public accuser before the revolutionary tribunal, conducted the executions.
"'I do not like, exclaimed the Queen to them, dem yellow irresistibles! "Lady Spencer nearly fainted. 'Vat make you so frightful, my dear lady? said the Queen to her ladyship, who was covering her face with her hands. 'I am terrified at Your Majesty's mistake' 'Comment? did you no tell me just now, dat in England de lady call les culottes "irresistibles"? 'Oh, mercy!
"We are republicans; more than that, we are sans- culottes! and shall we not keep our word? ought we not to be better than the cursed aristocrats, that never kept their word to the people? How can you disgrace us and yourself so much? Ask our noble friend and brother Simon, whether he is of the opinion that a free man ought not to keep his word, even if he has only given it to a woman in prison."
Of the former, four were three-decked ships, carrying ninety-eight to one hundred guns, a class of vessel of which the French had but one, the "Sans Culottes," of one hundred and twenty, which, under the more dignified name of "L'Orient," afterwards, met so tragic a fate at the Battle of the Nile; but they had, in compensation, three powerful ships of eighty guns, much superior to the British seventy-fours.
Leaving my wife, and, what was of more consequence, the whole of my property, in the hands of the jacobin, I joined the mob, and vowing vengeance upon all aristocrats, became one of the most violent leaders of the sans culottes.
It will be remembered by the reader, that in the year 1793, Henriot, a vulgar and furious republican, proposed setting off for the former church, at the head of the sans culottes, to destroy all these curious and valuable relics, "to strike," as he said, "the tyrants in their tombs," but was prevented by some other republicans of influence, who had not parted with their veneration for works of taste, from this impious and impotent outrage.
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