its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries,
of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for
liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late
hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for
the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the
barricades for the night.

And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Greve and made for the
various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing sight.

It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such fools! They
were traitors to the people of course, all of them, men, women, and
children, who happened to be descendants of the great men who since the
Crusades had made the glory of France: her old NOBLESSE. Their ancestors
had oppressed the people, had crushed them under the scarlet heels of
their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the rulers
of France and crushed their former masters--not beneath their heel, for
they went shoeless mostly in these days--but a more effectual weight,
the knife of the guillotine.

And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many
victims--old men, young women, tiny children until the day when it would
finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen.

But this was as it should be: were not the people now the rulers of
France? Every aristocrat was a traitor, as his ancestors had been before
him: for two hundred years now the people had sweated, and toiled,
and starved, to keep a lustful court in lavish extravagance; now the
descendants of those who had helped to make those courts brilliant
had to hide for their lives--to fly, if they wished to avoid the tardy