Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, it would add "Ou la mort."
It would bring about a general bankruptcy. It would ruin the
rich without enriching the poor. It would destroy labour,
which gives to each one his bread. It would abolish property
and family. It would march about with the heads of the
proscribed on pikes, fill the prisons with the suspected, and
empty them by massacres. It would convert France into the
country of gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts,
silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action
these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the
other--the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it
would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and
after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have
the horrible in all that was low and small.

(VICTOR HUGO, 1848.)




PREFACE.


Early in June of the present year I was making notes and sketches,
without the least idea of what I should do with them. I was at the
Mont-Parnasse Station of the Western Railway, awaiting a train from
Paris to St. Cloud. Our fellow passengers, as we discovered afterwards,
were principally prisoners for Versailles; the guards, soldiers; and the
line, for two miles at least, appeared desolation and ruin.