For nine months,[3217] street ballad-singers and coffee-house ranters attend in full session and sing the rhymes of the day, while the Convention is obliged to join in the chorus.

For six weeks,[3218] the profaners of churches come to the hall and display their dance-house buffooneries, and the Convention has not only to put up with these, but also to take part in them .-- Never, even in imperial Rome, under Nero and Heliogabalus, did a senate descend so low.
II.

Its participation in crime.
How the parades are carried out .-- Its slavery and servility -- Its participation in crime.
Observe one of their parades, that of Brumaire 20th, 22nd or 30th, which masquerade often occurs several times a week and is always the same, with scarcely any variation .-- Male and female wretches march in procession to the doors of the deputies' hall, still "drunk with the wine imbibed from chalices, after eating mackerel broiled in patens," besides refreshing themselves on the way.

"Mounted astride of asses which they have rigged out in chasuble and which they guide with a stole," they halt at each low smoking-den, holding a drinking cup in their hand; the bartender, with a mug in his hand, fills it, and, at each station, they toss off their bumpers, one after the other, in imitation of the Mass, and which they repeat in the street in their own fashion .-- On finishing this, they don copes, chasubles and dalmatica, and, in two long lines, file before the benches of the Convention.

Some of them bear on hand-barrows or in baskets, candelabra, chalices, gold and silver salvers, monstrances, and reliquaries; others hold aloft banners, crosses and other ecclesiastical spoils.