Roland has only to flick through two or three reports to see how patriotism furnishes a cloak for brutal license and greed.

At Coucy, in the department of Aisne,[3271] the peasantry of seventeen parishes, assembled for the purpose of furnishing their military quota, rush with a loud clamor to two houses, the property of M.des Fosses, a former deputy to the Constituent Assembly, and the two finest in the town; one of them had been occupied by Henry IV.

Some of the municipal officers who try to interfere are nearly cut to pieces, and the entire municipal body takes to flight.

M.des Fosses, with his two daughters, succeed in hiding themselves in an obscure corner in the vicinity, and afterwards in a small tenement offered to them by a humane gardener, and finally, after great difficulty, they reach Soissons.

Of his two houses, "nothing remains but the walls.