Five front men, chosen by Duprat and his associates, compose, with Lecuyer as secretary, a provisional municipal body, which, taxing the town 300,000 francs and suppressing the convents, offers the spoils of the churches for sale.

The bells are taken down, and the hammers of the workmen engaged in breaking them to pieces are heard all day long.

A strong-box full of plate, diamonds, and gold crosses, left with the director of the Mont-de-Piete, on deposit, is taken and carried off to the commune; a report is spread that the valuables pawned by the poor had been stolen by the municipality, and that those "robbers had already sent away eighteen trunks full of them." Upon this the women, exasperated at the bare walls of the churches, together with the laborers in want of work or bread, all the common class, become furious, assemble of their own accord in the church of the Cordeliers, summon Lecuyer to appear before them, drag him from the pulpit and massacre him.[2447] This time there seems to be an end of the brigand party, for the entire town, the populace and the better class, are against them, while the peasants in the country shoot them down wherever they come across them .-- Terror, however, supplies the place of numbers, and, with the 350 hired killers bravos still left to them, the extreme Jacobins undertake to overcome a city of 30,000 souls.

Mainvielle the elder, dragging along two cannon, arrives with a patrol, fires at random into the already semi-abandoned church, and kills two men.

Duprat assembles about thirty of the towns-people, imprisoned by him on the 31st of August, and, in addition to these, about forty artisans belonging to the Catholic brotherhoods, porters, bakers, coopers, and day-laborers, two peasants, a beggar, a few women seized haphazard and on vague denunciations, one of them, "because she spoke ill of Madame Mainvielle." Jourdan supplies the executioners; the apothecary Mende, brother-in-law of Duprat, plies them with liquor, while a clerk of Tournal, the newsman, bids them "kill all, so that there shall be no witnesses left." Whereupon, at the reiterated orders of Mainvielle, Tournal, Duprat, and Jourdan, with a complications of hilarious lewdness,[2448] the massacre develops itself on the 16th of October and following days, during sixty-six hours, the victims being a couple of priests, three children, an old man of eighty, thirteen women, two of whom are pregnant, in all, sixty-one persons, with their throats slit or knocked out and then cast one on top of each other into the Glaciere hole, a mother on the body of her infant, a son on the body of his father, all finished off with rocks, the hole being filled up with stones and covered over with quicklime on account of the smell.[2449] In the meantime about a hundred more, killed in the streets, are pitched into the Sorgues canal; five hundred families make their escape.