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Updated: May 13, 2025
"You never know," he would say, "and I'm not going to be caught like that fool Grospierre." The women who drove the carts usually spent their day on the Place de la Greve, beneath the platform of the guillotine, knitting and gossiping, whilst they watched the rows of tumbrils arriving with the victims the Reign of Terror claimed every day.
"Would it could have been to-night. But the guillotine has been busy; over four hundred executions to-day...and the tumbrils are full the seats bespoken in advance and still they come.... But to-morrow morning at daybreak Madame la Guillotine will have a word to say to the whole of the Montreux crowd!"
Europeans, accustomed to see carriages, dog-carts and all kinds of horse-drawn conveyances circulating freely on macadamised roads, find it difficult to realise that, in the oldest civilised empire in existence, there are, outside the treaty-ports, not only no macadamised roads, but not even roads that could possibly be compared with our most out-of-the-way and most ill-kept country lanes, and that consequently there are neither carriages nor dogcarts, but only springless tumbrils, which, covered with a wain, discharge the functions of the celestial cab, and plough through deep mud with their massive wheels, or jolt over stone causeways to the intense discomfort of luckless occupants.
In its own way it was Britain's mob saying to Britain's Regulars that it was to be hoped no one would think they imagined themselves soldiers in the real sense of the word. But to Selwyn the noise of their marching feet on the roadway had the ominous sound of the roll of the tumbrils, bearing their victims to the guillotine.
Next morning, Wednesday, 24th, the Prussians are early astir again; groping, on all manner of roads, to find what Prince Karl is doing, in a world all covered in thick mist. They can find nothing of him, but broken tumbrils, left baggage-wagons, rumor of universal marching hither and marching thither; evidences of an Army fallen into universal St.
Our only resource then will be to make a desperate sally, and to capture their guns and tumbrils." At any moment the fort might be attacked, for as the paper brought by Faithful was not dated, it was difficult to say how long it had been on its journey.
He now went about among the plague- stricken, attending to their wants, both spiritual and temporal, and sold or mortgaged all his property to obtain relief for them, and he actually went himself in the tumbrils of corpses to give them the rites of Christian burial.
But what can be done about it? These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public. The laughter of all is the accomplice of universal degradation. Certain unhealthy festivals disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace. And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The King has Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew.
It was not the policy of the revolutionary government to allow excesses of summary justice in the streets: the public execution of traitors on the Place de la Revolution, the processions in the tumbrils, were thought to be wholesome examples for other would-be traitors to mark and digest.
Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, had set the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for Marie Antoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him to pursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. The spring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with a maddening sensitiveness at the sight of suffering.
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