Meanwhile, in this same town, twenty-two gentlemen; at Beaune, forty priests and nobles; at Dijon, eighty-three heads of families, locked up as suspected without evidence or examination, and confined at their own expense two months under pikes, ask themselves every morning whether the populace and the volunteers, who shout death cries through the streets, mean to release them in the same way as in Paris.[3284]--A trifle is sufficient to provoke a murder.

On the 19th of August, at Auxerre as the National Guard is marching along, three citizens, after having taken the civic oath, "left the ranks," and, on being called back, "to make them fall in," one, either impatient or in ill-humor, "replied with an indecent gesture".

The populace, taking it as an insult, instantly rush at them, and shoving aside the municipal body and the National Guards, wound one and kill the other two.[3285] A fortnight after, in the same town, several young ecclesiastics are massacred, and "the corpse of one of them remains three days on a manure heap, the relatives not being allowed to bury it." About the same date, in a village of sabot makers, five leagues from Autun, four ecclesiastics provided with passports, among them a bishop and his two grand-vicars, are arrested, then examined, robbed, and murdered by the peasantry .-- Below Autun, especially in the district of Roanne, the villagers burn the rent-rolls of national property; the volunteers put property-owners to ransom; both, apart from each other or together, give themselves up "to every excess and to every sort of iniquity against those whom they suspect of incivism under pretense of religious opinions."[3286] However preoccupied or upset Roland's mind may be by the philosophic generalities with which it is filled, he has long inspected manufactures in this country; the name of every place is familiar to him; objects and forms are this time clearly defined to his arid imagination, and he begins to see things through and beyond mere words.
Madame Roland rests her finger on Lyons, so familiar to her two years before; she becomes excited against "the quadruple aristocracy of the town, petty nobles, priests, heavy merchants, and limbs of the law; in short, those formerly known as honest folks, according to the insolence of the ancient regime."[3287] She may now find an aristocracy of another kind there, that of the gutter.

Following the example of Paris, the Lyons clubbists, led by Charlier, have arranged for a massacre on a grand scale of the evil-disposed or suspected Another ringleader, Dodieu, has drawn up a list by name of two hundred aristocrats to be hung; on the 9th of September, women with pikes, the maniacs of the suburbs, bands of "the unknown," collected by the central club,[3288] undertake to clean out the prisons.

If the butchery is not equal to that of Paris, it is because the National Guard, more energetic, interferes just at the moment when a Parisian emissary, Saint-Charles, reads off a list of names in the prison of Roanne already taken from the prison register.