The commander of the squad who guards prisoners on the way to Paris, and who "starves them along the road to speculate on them," is an ex-cook of Agen, having become a gendarme; he makes them travel forty leagues extra, "purposely to glorify himself," and "let all Agen see that he has government money to spend, and that he can put citizens in irons." Accordingly, in Agen, "he keeps constantly and needlessly inspecting the vehicle," winking at the spectators, "more triumphant than if he had made a dozen Austrians prisoners and brought them along himself." At last, to show the crowd in the street the importance of his capture, he summons two blacksmiths to come out and rivet, on the legs of each prisoner, a cross-bar cannon-ball weighing eighty pounds.[33152] The more display these henchmen make of their brutality, the greater they think themselves.

At Belfort, a patriot of the club dies, and a civic interment takes place; a detachment of the revolutionary army joins the procession; the men are armed with axes; on reaching the cemetery, the better to celebrate the funeral, "they cut down all the crosses (over the graves) and make a bonfire of them, while the carmagnole ends this ever memorable day."[33153]--Sometimes the scene, theatrical and played by the light of flambeaux, makes the actors think that they have performed an extraordinary and meritorious action, "that they have saved the country." "This very night," writes the agent at Bordeaux,[33154] nearly three thousand men have been engaged in an important undertaking, with the members of the Revolutionary Committee and of the municipality at the head of it.

They visited every wholesale dealer's store in town and in the Faubourg des Chartrons, taking possession of their letter-books, sealing up their desks, arresting the merchants and putting them in the Seminiare....

Woe to the guilty!"-- If the prompt confinement of an entire class of individuals is a fine thing for a town, the seizure of a whole town itself is still more imposing.

Leaving Marseilles with a small army,[33155] commanded by two sans-culottes, they surround Martigne and enter it as if it were a mill.