but that feeling was not shared by the sober part of the population of the capital. General consternation prevailed there. The shops continued shut and the streets deserted the whole of the day on which Louis suffered. Groups of assassins alone were to be seen, singing revolutionary songs as before the massacre in September. In this state of the public mind, a circumstance which occurred on the 20th of January was seized by the men of blood as a welcome occasion for producing other impressions. This was the murder of a deputy, Lepelletier St. Fargeau, one of those who had voted for the king's death, by Paris, who had formerly belonged to the life guard. This man had sworn to revenge the death of his master. It is believed that the duke of Orleans was the object against whom his fury was first directed, but, not meeting with him, and finding Lepelletier in an eating-house in the Palais Royal, he plunged his sword into the bosom of that deputy, who survived but a few hours. Though fifty persons witnessed this scene, the murderer escaped. After wandering about the country for some days, he reached Forges les Eaux, where his appearance and manner excited suspicions, and to escape apprehension he shot himself with a pistol.

When the death of Lepelletier was reported to the Convention, the Jacobin members raised a prodigious outcry. They represented this murder of their colleague as a proof of the existence of a conspiracy against their whole party. They insisted that the Girondists, in concert with the royalists, were the authors of this plot. Robespierre proposed fresh domiciliary visits for the discovery of suspected persons; and, after a long and violent debate, it was decreed that a new Committee of General Welfare should be chosen on the following day. That committee had hitherto been composed of Girondists, who were at least desirous of preserving order and tranquillity

in the capital; and in their stead none but furious Jacobins, authors of the September massacres, were now elected. It was also decreed that Lepelletier should be honoured with a public funeral, to be attended by the whole of the Convention, and that he should be buried in the Pantheon.

The in which that funeral was conducted conveys way some idea of the means employed by the dominant party to produce an effect upon the people, and deserves notice as illustrative of the manners of that time. The corpse, naked to the waist, was carried upon a bier covered with the blood-stained sheets upon which the murdered deputy had expired. The wound was exposed to view. Before it, the fatal sword and his bloody garments were borne at the end of pikes by men belonging to the lowest of the rabble. The body was set down by the pedestal of the demolished statue of Louis XIV., upon which was this inscription: "I shed my blood with cheerfulness for the country, and hope that it will serve for the consolidation of liberty and equality, and for the discovery of their enemies." At twelve o'clock the members of the Convention arrived in the Place Vendome. The president crowned the corpse with a wreath of oak. The procession was headed by a body of cavalry; next came a band of music, followed by national guards, the judges, the ministers, the members of the Jacobin club, male and female, some of them carrying the rights of man engraved on stone, others the statue of liberty; after them federalists, and then the corpse. The members of the Convention brought up the rear. In the Pantheon an oration was delivered, hymns of liberty were sung, and, by way of finale, the populace broke in pieces the bust of Mirabeau, their former idol.

Three days afterwards, the municipality, with a view to weaken the impression which it was but too evident

that the execution of the king had made, devised a new spectacle for the mob. Before the deposition of Louis, the tree of liberty had ceased to be a metaphorical expression it had become the practice to plant large trees in the public places and before the principal buildings of the city, and to crown them with the red cap, the emblem of the Jacobins. At first, these trees were in general poplars, but that which the ruffians hired for the purpose placed before the entrance of the Tuileries was an aspen. When the English reader recollects that the French name for the latter is tremble, the reason for this substitution will be sufficiently obvious. As the designation of the poplar (peuplier) furnished occasion for satirical allusions, the fir was afterwards employed in its stead. On the 27th of January, one of these trees of liberty was planted with extraordinary ceremony in the Place du Carroussel. The Convention, the municipality, and a great concourse of people attended this fête, which concluded with singing and dancing. A bust of Brutus was paraded about, as the images of saints had formerly been, and treated with the same kind of reverence; and the name of the theatre of this farce was ordered to be changed from that day to the Place of Fraternity. All France soon imitated this example; and the republican armies did the same in all the towns of foreign countries which the fortune of war put into their possession.

CHAPTER XX.

INSURRECTION IN ST. DOMINGO.

We have seen the awful results of the new doctrine of the Rights of Man in France; let us now inquire what sort of fruit it produced in her West India colonies. The principal of these were the islands of Martinique and

Guadeloupe, and the western division of Hispaniola, or St. Domingo.

The latter extensive island, one of the first discoveries of Columbus in the New World, was computed to contain at that time a million inhabitants, a gentle, peaceful race, who, in the course of half a century, were nearly exterminated by the inhuman cruelties of the Spaniards. The colony was then neglected by these oppressors, whose attention was drawn to countries where the precious metals were more abundant. In the first half of the 17th century, French adventurers settled in the western part: they were encouraged by the government, and, in 1697, Louis XIV. obtained from Spain the cession of that portion of the island. This soon became a flourishing and important acquisition, furnishing in profusion all the different kinds of West India produce, which were cultivated, as in the colonies of other nations, by negro slaves imported from Africa. These constituted, of course, the bulk of the population; the whites consisting, in 1790, of 30,000, who paid taxes, besides two regiments, comprehending 1400 men, and others who were not rated. The mulattoes, who, like the whites, were free, amounted to between 24,000 and 25,000. The number of the negro slaves throughout the colony was not less than 480,000.

Many of the proprietors of estates in this island were extremely wealthy. De la Borde, a banker, is said to have derived from his plantations a yearly income of between fifteen and eighteen hundred thousand livres; and numbers of impoverished nobles had retrieved their fortunes by marrying into the families of these colonists.

Shortly before the commencement of the revolution in France, the discussions in the British parliament on the abolition of the slave-trade had attracted the attention of other nations possessing colonies. In Paris, a society, called The Friends of the Blacks, was formed, and, not

limiting its views to the suppression of the traffic in slaves, attempted the cultivation of some plantations in Cayenne by means of free negroes. When the celebrated declaration of the Rights of Man was promulgated, the leading persons of this society, the abbé Gregoire, Lafayette, Brissot, Condorcet, and others, despatched thousands of copies, to which were attached explanations and comments, to be distributed among the people of colour, many of whom, though themselves the owners of plantations and slaves, were not allowed to participate in the rights enjoyed by the white inhabitants. The latter, of course, took alarm at the new doctrine, the tendency of which was, in fact, to confer not only immediate liberty on every slave in the island, but all the privileges hitherto exclusively possessed by their masters.

Soon after the formation of the first National Assembly, the government, apprehensive that disorders might arise in St. Domingo from the proceedings in France, sent orders in September, 1789, to the governor, to convoke the inhabitants for the purpose of electing a legislative assembly for interior regulation. Before this order arrived, the Northern district had already constituted a provincial assembly, and its example was followed by the Western and Southern provinces. Meanwhile, the mulattoes, instructed by their brethren in the mother country in the nature and extent of their rights, began to show a spirit of sedition, and determined to claim, without delay, all the privileges enjoyed by the whites. Large bodies of them assembled in arms, but, acting without concert, were speedily overpowered. The provincial assemblies displayed at this juncture a most laudable spirit of moderation, granting an unconditional pardon on the submission of the insurgents.

Early in 1790, alarming reports reached France respecting the temper of the planters of St. Domingo, who were generally represented as disposed to renounce their de