for a revel with prostitutes. -- Meanwhile, the guillotine is kept
going, and people are fired at and shot down with grape-shot. The
revolutionary committee officially avow one thousand six hundred and
eighty-two acts of murder committed in five months,[96] while a
confederate of Robespierre's privately declare that there were six
thousand.[97]

Blacksmiths are condemned to death for having shod the Lyonnese
cavalry, firemen for having extinguished fires kindled by republican
bombshells, a widow for having paid a war-tax during the siege, market
women for "having shown disrespect to patriots." It is an organized
"Septembrisade" made legal and lasting; its authors are so well aware
of the fact as to use the word itself in their public
correspondence.[98] -- At Toulon it is worse, people are slaughtered
in heaps, almost haphazard. Notwithstanding that the inhabitants the
most compromised, to the number of four thousand, take refuge on board
English vessels, the whole city, say the representatives, is guilty.
Four hundred workmen in the navy-yard having marched out to meet
Fréron, he reminds them that they kept on working during the English
occupation of the town, and he has them put to death on the spot. An
order is issued to all "good citizens to assemble in the Champ de Mars
on penalty of death." They come there to the number of three thousand;
Fréron, on horseback, surrounded by cannon and troops, arrives with
about a hundred Maratists, the former accomplices of Lemaille,
Sylvestre, and other well-known assassins, who form a body of local
auxiliaries and counselors; he tells them to select out of the crowd
at pleasure according to their grudge, fancy, or caprice; all who are
designated are ranged along a wall and shot. The next morning, and on
the following days, the operation is renewed: Fréron writes on the
16th of Nivose that "eight hundred Toulonese have already been shot."