Part 8

The barracks were still in flames, as well as the houses of the Swiss porters at the end of the gardens; these last gave light to five or six waggons which were employed all night in carrying away the dead carcases.

STATUES PULLED DOWN. NEW NAMES.

THE next day, Saturday the 11th, about an hundred Swiss who had not been in the palace placed themselves under the protection of the National Assembly. They were sent to the Palais Bourbon escorted by the Marseillois, with Mr. Petion at their head, in order to be tried by a court-martial.

The people were now employed, some in hanging thieves, others with Mademoiselle Teroigne on horseback at their head, in pulling down the statues of the French Kings.

The first was the equestrian one in bronze of Lewis XV. in the square of the same name, at the end of the Tuileries gardens; this was the work of Bouchardon, and was erected in 1763. At the corners of the pedestal were the statues, also in bronze, of strength, peace, prudence, and justice, by Pigalle. Many smiths were employed in filing the iron bars within the horse's legs and feet, which fastened it to the marble pedestal, and the sans-culottes pulled it down by ropes, and broke it to pieces; as likewise the four statues above-mentioned, the pedestal, and the new magnificent balustrade of white marble which surrounded it.

The next was the equestrians statue of Lewis XIV. in the Place Vendome, cast in bronze, in a single piece, by Keller, from the model of Girardon; twenty men might with ease have sat round a table in the belly of the horse; it stood on a pedestal of white marble of thirty feet in height, twenty-four in length, and thirteen in breadth. This statue crushed a man to pieces by falling on him, which must be attributed to the inexperience of the pullers-down.

The third was a pedestrian statue of Lewis XIV. in the Place Victoire, of lead, gilt, on a pedestal of white marble; a winged figure, representing victory, with one hand placed a crown of laurels on his head, and in the other held a bundle of palm and olive branches. The king was represented treading on Cerberus and the whole group was a single cast. There were formerly four bronze slaves at the corners of the pedestal, each of twelve feet high; these were removed in 1790. The whole monument was thirty-five feet high, and was erected in 1689, at the expence of the Duke de la Feuillade, who likewise left his duchy to his heirs, on condition that they should cause the whole group to be new gilt every twenty-five years; and who was buried under the pedestal.

On Sunday the 12th, at about noon, the equestrian statue, in bronze, of Henry IV. which was on the Pont-neuf, was pulled down; this was erected in 1635, and was the first of the kind in Paris. The horse was begun at Florence, by Giovanni Bologna, a pupil of Michael Angelo, finished by Pietro Tacca, and sent as a present to Mary of Medicis, widow of Henry IV. Regent. It was shipped at Leghorn, and the vessel which contained it was lost on the coast of Normandy, near Havre de Grace, the horse remained a year in the sea, it was, however, got out and sent to Paris in 1614.

This statue used to be the idol of the Parisians; immediately after the revolution it was decorated with the national cockade; during three evenings after the federation, in 1790, magnificent festivals were celebrated before it.

It was broken in many pieces by the fall; the bronze was not half an inch thick, and the hollow part was filled up with brick earth.

The fifth and last was overthrown in the afternoon of the same day; it was situated in the Place Royale; it was an equestrian statue in bronze, of Lewis XIII. on a vast pedestal of white marble; it was erected in 1639. The horse was the work of Daniel Volterra; the figure of the king was by Biard.

The people were several days employed in pulling down all the statues and busts of kings and queens they could find. On the Monday I saw a marble or stone statue, as large as the life, tumbled from the top of the Hotel de Ville into the Place de Greve, at that time full of people, by which two men were killed, as I was told, and I did not wish to verify the assertion myself, but retired.

They then proceeded to deface and efface every crown, every fleur de lis, every inscription wherein the words king, queen, prince, royal, or the like, were found. The hotels and lodging-houses were compelled to erase and change their names, that of the Prince de Galles must be called de Galles only; that of Bourbon must have a new name; a sign au lys d'or (the golden lily) was pulled down; even billiard tables are no longer noble or royal.

The Pont-royal, the new bridge of Lewis XVI. the Place des Victoires, the Place Royal, the Rue d'Artois, &c. have all new names, which, added to the division of the kingdom into eighty-three departments, abolishing all the ancient noble names of Bourgogne, Champagne, Provence, Languedoc, Bretagne, Navarre, Normandie, &c. and in their stead substituting such as these: Ain, Aube, Aude, Cher, Creuse, Doubs, Eure, Gard, Gers, Indre, Lot, Orne, Sarte, Tarne, Var, &c. which are the names of insignificant rivers; to that of Paris into forty-eight new sections, and to all titles being likewise abolished, makes it very difficult for a stranger to know any thing about the geography of the kingdom, nor what were the ci-devant titles of such of the nobility as still remain in France, and who are at present only known by their family names.

BEHEADING. DEAD NAKED BODIES.

BUT to return to those "active citizens, whom aristocratic insolence has stiled sans-culottes, brigands."

On Sunday, they dragged a man to the Hotel de Ville, before a magistrate, to be tried, for having stolen something in the Tuileries as they said. He was accordingly tried, searched, and nothing being found on him, was acquitted; n'importe, said these citizens, we must have his head for all that, for we caught him in the act of stealing. They laid him on his back on the ground, and in the presence of the judge, who had acquitted him, they sawed off his head in about a quarter of an hour, with an old notched scythe, and then gave it to the boys to carry about on a pike, leaving the carcase in the justice-hall.

At the corner of almost every chief street is a black marble slab, inserted in the wall about ten feet high, on which is cut in large letters, gilt, Loix et actes de l'autorite publique (laws and acts of the public authority) and underneath are pasted the daily and sometimes hourly decrees and notices of the National Assembly. One of these acquainted the citizens, that Mandat (the former commander-general of the national guards) had yesterday undergone the punishment due to his crimes; that is to say, the people had cut off his head.

During several days, after the day I procured all the Paris newspapers, about twenty, but all on the same side, as the people had put the editors of the aristocratic papers, hors d'etat de parler (prevented their speaking) by beheading one or two of them, and destroying all their presses.

They, about this time, hanged two money changers (people who gave paper for louis d'or, crowns, and guineas) under the idea that the money was sent to the emigrants.

On the Saturday morning, at seven, I was in the Tuileries gardens; only thirty-eight dead naked bodies were still lying there; they were however covered where decency required; the people who stript them on the preceding evening, having cut a gash in the belly, and left a bit of the shirt sticking to the carcase by means of the dried blood. I was told, that the body of a lady had just been carried out of the Carousel square; she was the only woman killed, and that probably by accident. Here I had the pleasure of seeing many beautiful ladies (and ugly ones too as I thought) walking arm in arm with their male friends, though so early in the morning, and forming little groups, occupied in contemplating the mangled naked and stiff carcases.

The fair sex has been equally courageous and curious, in former times, in this as well as in other countries; and of this we shall produce a few instances, as follows:

COURAGE AND CURIOSITY OF THE FAIR SEX. MASSACRE IN 1572.

ON the 24th of August, St. Bartholemew's day, 1572, the massacre of the Hugonots or or Calvinists, began by the murder of Admiral Coligni the signal was to have been given at midnight; but Catherine of Medicis, mother to the then King Charles IX. (who was only two and twenty years of age) hastened the signal more than an hour, and endeavoured to encourage her son, by quoting a passage from a sermon: "What pity do we not shew in being cruel? what cruelty would it not be to have pity?"

In Mr. Wraxall's account of this massacre, in his Memoirs of the Kings of France of the Race of Valois, compiled from all the French historians, he says, Soubise, covered with wounds, after a long and gallant defence, was finally put to death under the queen-mother's windows. The ladies of the court, from a savage and horrible curiosity, went to view his naked body, disfigured and bloody.

"An Italian first cut off Coligni's head, which was presented to Catherine of Medicis. The populace then exhausted all their brutal and unrestrained fury on the trunk. They cut off the hands, after which it was left on a dunghill; in the afternoon they took it up again, dragged it three days in the dirt, then on the banks of the Seine, and lastly carried it to Montfaucon (an eminence between the Fauxbourg St. Martin and the Temple, on which they erected a gallows.) It was here hung by the feet with an iron chain, and a fire lighted under it, with which it was half roasted. In this situation the King and several of the courtiers went to survey it. These remains were at length taken down privately in the night, and interred at Chantilly."

"During seven days the massacre did not cease, though its extreme fury spent itself in the two first."

"Every enormity, every profanation, every atrocious crime, which zeal, revenge, and cruel policy are capable of influencing mankind to commit, stain the dreadful registers of this unhappy period. More than five thousand persons of all ranks perished by various species of deaths. The Seine was loaded with carcases floating on it, and Charles fed his eyes from the windows of the Louvre, with this unnatural and abominable spectacle of horror. A butcher who entered the palace during the heat of the massacre, boasted to his sovereign, baring his bloody arm, that he himself had dispatched an hundred and fifty."