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Even as I am writing to you, my pen is shaking with terror, for I hear the tumbrel come jolting along, and I know that it is loaded with innocent men and women who are going to the guillotine; and I know also that it is accompanied by a mob of dreadful creatures mostly women for I hear them singing no, screaming in a kind of rage, "Ca ira les aristocrates a la lanterne!"
With a shudder, she recalled the events of the last few days, her escape from Paris with her two children, all three of them hidden beneath the hood of a rickety cart, and lying amidst a heap of turnips and cabbages, not daring to breathe, whilst the mob howled, "A la lanterne les aristos!" at the awful West Barricade.
Their object is, that their fellow-citizens may be under the dominion of no awe, but that of their committee of research, and of their lanterne. Having found the advantage of assassination in the formation of their tyranny, it is the grand resource in which they trust for the support of it.
They destroy all the tranquillity and security of domestic life; turning the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison, where the father of the family must drag out a miserable existence, endangered in proportion to the apparent means of his safety; where he is worse than solitary in a crowd of domestics, and more apprehensive from his servants and inmates, than from the hired, bloodthirsty mob without doors, who are ready to pull him to the lanterne.
Here it is nearly two months since you have written to your old troubadour! you in Paris, in Nohant, or elsewhere? And when are they to play this Cadio? Are you content? etc., etc. I live absolutely like an oyster. My novel is the rock to which I attach myself, and I don't know anything that goes on in the world. I do not even read, or rather I have not read La Lanterne!
"'Les bourgeois a la lanterne, nom de dieu! It's from a song," said Rosaline. "Oh, qu'il est malin, ce Coco!" Rosaline was standing with her arms folded beside the bunk. The parrot stretched out his neck and rubbed it against her cheek, closing and unclosing his gem-like eyes. The girl formed her lips into a kiss, and murmured in a drowsy voice: "Tu m'aimes, Coco, n'est-ce pas, Coco? Bon Coco."
You all know of her journey to Paris, and her mockery of a trial before the tribunal her pitiful bravery when the inhuman monsters tried to make her say "À la lanterne!" Nothing would induce her to she had the firmness of many ancestors behind her. We will quote Ben-Hepple's vivid description of her execution: "The day dawned grey with heavy clouds to the east," he says.
After the fourteenth of July 1789, political literature became more subject to mobs and the lanterne, than ever it had been to Ministers and Bastilles; and at the tenth of August 1792, every vestige of the liberty of the press disappeared.*
"A la lanterne!" stammered and hiccupped others of the group; but they did not stir to execute their threat.
The quaint little walk, with its label of Rue sur les Murs, to which one ascends from beside the Grosse Horloge, leads to this curious Tour de la Lanterne and passes under it.
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