Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 6.djvu/92

78 His heart was contended for by several churches, but that of the Cordeliers retained the worthless prize. Women strewed flowers on the coffin as it passed, and the convention attended the funeral in a body, and the president made a flowery discourse over the grave. A pension was voted to his mistress, whom the convention dignified by the sacred title of wife. The Rue de Cordeliers was changed into the Rue de la Marat, and the square near it into the Place de l'Ami du Peuple, in his honour.



Marat was about fifty years old, and, notwithstanding the charges of greed made against him by madame Roland and others, no money was found after his death. His printing presses were purchased by order of the convention, and his journal continued by some of his coadjutors. Busts were ordered in vast quantities, and of all sizes and qualities; and so this monster was honoured by a nation in whom he had so effectually evoked the passion for wholesale murder! That murder was now fully inaugurated. Blood flowed in torrents, not soon to be stayed, as if in honour of this modern Moloch. It flowed everywhere, and at the command of all parties. On the day following that on which Charlotte Corday perished by the guillotine in Paris by the hands of the jacobins, Chalier, the president of the jacobin club at Lyons, had his head lopped off by the Girondists in that city, along with the head of his jacobin friend, Riard.

These executions seemed to be the signal for the rush of the jacobin forces on the city of Lyons. It was speedily invested by numerous troops, under the command of Dubois-Crancé, one of the commissioners of the convention. On the 21st of August he summoned the place to surrender, but the Lyonese held out till the 2nd of October, when Couthon, one of the most ruthless of the jacobin deputies, arrived, with twenty-eight thousand armed peasants, from Anvergne. He demanded that the city should be instantly bombarded, and, if necessary, reduced to ruins. Dubois-Crancé said there was no need for this merciless alternative, as the place must very soon yield from famine. Couthon thereupon obtained an order from the convention to supersede