Why should the People of France be led to think that the era of a new religion would mean an era of milk and water, of pageants and of fireworks?
Let every man, woman, and child know that this was an era of blood and again of blood.
"Oh!" he exclaimed in passionate accents, "would that all the traitors in France had but one head, that it might be cut off with one blow of the guillotine!" He approved of the National fete, but he desired an apotheosis of the guillotine; he undertook to find ten thousand traitors to be beheaded on one grand and glorious day: ten thousand heads to adorn the Place de la Revolution on a great, never-to-be-forgotten evening, after the guillotine had accomplished this record work.
But Collot d'Herbois would also have his say.

Collot lately hailed from the South, with a reputation for ferocity unparalleled throughout the whole of this horrible decade.

He would not be outdone by Tinville's bloodthirsty schemes.
He was the inventor of the "Noyades," which had been so successful at Lyons and Marseilles.

"Why not give the inhabitants of Paris one of these exhilarating spectacles ?" he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh.
Then he explained his invention, of which he was inordinately proud.
Some two or three hundred traitors, men, women, and children, tied securely together with ropes in great, human bundles and thrown upon a barge in the middle of the river: the barge with a hole in her bottom! not too large! only sufficient to cause her to sink slowly, very slowly, in sight of the crowd of delighted spectators.
The cries of the women and children, and even of the men, as they felt the waters rising and gradually enveloping them, as they felt themselves powerless even for a fruitless struggle, had proved most exhilarating, so Citizen Collot declared, to the hearts of the true patriots of Lyons.
Thus the discussion continued.
This was the era when every man had but one desire, that of outdoing others in ferocity and brutality, and but one care, that of saving his own head by threatening that of his neighbour.
The great duel between the Titanic leaders of these turbulent parties, the conflict between hot-headed Danton on the one side and cold-blooded Robespierre on the other, had only just begun; the great, all-devouring monsters had dug their claws into one another, but the issue of the combat was still at stake.
Neither of these two giants had taken part in these deliberations anent the new religion and the new goddess.

Danton gave signs now and then of the greatest impatience, and muttered something about a new form of tyranny, a new kind of oppression.
On the left, Robespierre in immaculate sea-green coat and carefully gauffered linen was quietly polishing the nails of his right hand against the palm of his left.
But nothing escaped him of what was going on.