these thirty years?" With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in
its hundred hands: he is whirled across the Place de Greve, to the
'Lanterne,' Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the Rue de la
Vannerie; pleading bitterly for life,--to the deaf winds. Only with the
third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice still pleaded),
can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the
streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass:
amid sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people. (Deux Amis de la
Liberte, ii. 60-6.)

Surely if Revenge is a 'kind of Justice,' it is a 'wild' kind! O mad
Sansculottism hast thou risen, in thy mad darkness, in thy soot and
rags; unexpectedly, like an Enceladus, living-buried, from under his
Trinacria? They that would make grass be eaten do now eat grass, in
this manner? After long dumb-groaning generations, has the turn suddenly
become thine?--To such abysmal overturns, and frightful instantaneous
inversions of the centre-of-gravity, are human Solecisms all liable,
if they but knew it; the more liable, the falser (and topheavier) they
are!--

To add to the horror of Mayor Bailly and his Municipals, word comes
that Berthier has also been arrested; that he is on his way hither from
Compiegne. Berthier, Intendant (say, Tax-levier) of Paris; sycophant
and tyrant; forestaller of Corn; contriver of Camps against the
people;--accused of many things: is he not Foulon's son-in-law; and, in
that one point, guilty of all? In these hours too, when Sansculottism
has its blood up! The shuddering Municipals send one of their number to
escort him, with mounted National Guards.

At the fall of day, the wretched Berthier, still wearing a face of