the new deity.

Public Prosecutor Foucquier Tinville thought all these schemes very
tame. Why should the People of France be led to think that the era of
a new religion would mean an era of milk and water, of pageants and
of fireworks? Let every man, woman, and child know that this was an
era of blood and again of blood.

"Oh!" he exclaimed in passionate accents, "would that all the traitors
in France had but one head, that it might be cut off with one blow of
the guillotine!"

He approved of the National fete, but he desired an apotheosis of the
guillotine; he undertook to find ten thousand traitors to be beheaded
on one grand and glorious day: ten thousand heads to adorn the Place
de la Revolution on a great, never-to-be-forgotten evening, after the
guillotine had accomplished this record work.

But Collot d'Herbois would also have his say. Collot lately hailed
from the South, with a reputation for ferocity unparalleled
throughout the whole of this horrible decade. He would not be
outdone by Tinville's bloodthirsty schemes.

He was the inventor of the "Noyades," which had been so successful
at Lyons and Marseilles. "Why not give the inhabitants of Paris one of
these exhilarating spectacles?" he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh.

Then he explained his invention, of which he was inordinately proud.
Some two or three hundred traitors, men, women, and children, tied
securely together with ropes in great, human bundles and thrown