. . . "A volley of musketry," says he, in another letter, and after
that, volley after volley, until "the traitors are all gone." Then,
for three months after this, the guillotine dispatches eighteen
hundred persons; eleven young women have to mount the scaffold
together, in honor of a republican festival; an old woman of ninety-
four is borne to it in an armchair. The population, initially of
twenty-eight thousand people, is reduced to six or seven thousand
only.

All this is not enough; the two cities that dared maintain a siege
must disappear from the French soil. The Convention decrees that "the
city of Lyons shall be destroyed: every house occupied by a rich man
shall be demolished; only the dwellings of the poor shall remain, with
edifices specially devoted to industry, and monuments consecrated to
humanity and public education."[99] The same at Toulon: "the houses
within the town shall be demolished; only the buildings that are
essential for army and navy purposes, for stores and munitions, shall
be preserved."[100] Consequently, a requisition is made in Var and
the neighboring departments for twelve thousand masons to level Toulon
to the ground. -- At Lyons, fourteen thousand laborers pull down the
Chateau Pierre-Encize; also the superb houses on Place Bellecour,
those of the Quai St.-Clair, those of the Rues de Flandre and de
Bourgneuf, and many others; the cost of all this amounts to four
hundred thousand livres per decade; in six months the Republic expends
fifteen millions in destroying property valued at three or four
hundred millions, all belonging to the Republic.[101] Since the
Mongols of the fifth and thirteenth centuries, no such vast and
irrational waste had been seen -- such frenzy against the most
profitable fruits of industry and human civilization. -- Again, one
can understand how the Mongols, who were nomads, desired to convert