"To-morrow, at seven o'clock," writes Hugues, "let the sacred guillotine be erected!"-- "The demoiselle guillotine," writes Lecarlier, "keeps steadily agoing."[32164]--"The relatives and friends of emigres and of refractory priests," writes Lebon, "monopolize the guillotine..

.[32165] Day before yesterday, the sister of the former Comte de Bethune sneezed in the sack." Carrier loudly proclaims "the pleasure he has derived" from seeing priests executed: "I never laughed in my life as I did at the faces they made in dying."[32166] This is the extreme perversity of human nature, that of a Domitian who watches the features of the condemned, to see the effect of suffering, or, better still, that of the savage who holds his sides with laughter at the aspect of a man being impaled.

And this delight of contemplating death throes, Carrier finds it in the sufferings of children.

Notwithstanding the remonstrances of the revolutionary Tribunal and the entreaties of President Phelippes-Tronjolly,[32167] he signs on the 29th of Frimaire, year II., a positive order to guillotine without trial twenty-seven persons, of whom seven are women, and, among these, four sisters, Mesdemoiselles de la Metayrie, one of these twenty-eight years old, another twenty-seven, the third twenty-six, and the fourth seventeen.

Two days before, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the same tribunal and the entreaties of the same president, he signed a positive order to guillotine twenty-six artisans and farm-hands, among them two boys of fourteen, and two of thirteen years of age.