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Taine, Hippolyte, 1828-1893

"The French Revolution - Volume 1"

"Under the pretext of searching suspicious houses,
they pillage or destroy, and what-ever cannot be carried away is
broken." One hundred and twenty houses are sacked in N?mes alone,
while the same ravages are committed in the environs, the damage, at
the end of three days, amounting to seven or eight hundred thousand
livres. A number of poor creatures, workmen, merchants, old and
infirm men, are massacred in their houses; some, "who have been
bedridden for many years, are dragged to the sills of their doors to
be shot." Others are hung on the esplanade and at the Cours Neuf,
while others have their noses, ears, feet, and hands cut off; and
are hacked to pieces with sabers and scythes. Horrible stories, as
is commonly the case, provoke the most atrocious acts.
A publican, who refuses to distribute anti-Catholic lists, is
supposed to have a mine in his cellar filled with kegs of gunpowder
and with sulfur matches all ready; he is hacked to pieces with a
saber, and twenty guns are discharged into his corpse: they expose
the body before his house with a long loaf of bread on his breast,
and they again stab him with bayonets, saying to him: "Eat, you
bastard, eat" - More than five hundred Catholics were
assassinated, and many others, covered with blood, "are crowded
together in the prisons, while the search for the proscribed is
continued; whenever they are seen, they are fired upon like so many
wolves.


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