Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/295

 looking out on misery, vacuity, waste Sands of OleronOléron [sic] and the ever-moaning brine. Ragged, sordid, hungry; wasted to shadows: eating their unclean ration on deck, circularly, in parties of a dozen, with finger and thumb; beating their scandalous clothes between two stones; choked in horrible miasmata, closed under hatches, seventy of them in a berth, through night; so that the 'aged Priest is found lying dead in the morning, in the attitude of prayer'! —How long, O Lord!

Not for ever; no. All Anarchy, all Evil, Injustice, is, by the nature of it, dragon's-teeth; suicidal, and cannot endure.

is very remarkable, indeed, that since the Être-Suprême Feast, and the sublime continued harangues on it, which Billaud feared would become a bore to him, Robespierre has gone little to Committee; but held himself apart, as if in a kind of pet. Nay they have made a Report on that old Catherine Théot, and her Regenerative Man spoken of by the Prophets; not in the best spirit. This Théot mystery they affect to regard as a Plot; but have evidently introduced a vein of satire, of irreverent banter, not against the Spinster alone, but obliquely against her Regenerative Man! Barrère's light pen was perhaps at the bottom of it: read through the solemn snuffling organs of old Vadier of the Sûreté Générale, the Théot Report had its effect; wrinkling the general Republican visage into an iron grin. Ought these things to be?

We note further, that among the Prisoners in the Twelve Houses of Arrest, there is one whom we have seen before. Senhora Fontenai, born Cabarus, the fair Proserpine whom Representative Tallien Pluto-like did gather at Bordeaux, not VOL. III.