And yet that massacre is in itself suggestive. The wholesale butcheries of the Terror are accountable; even the attempt of Robespierre, St. Just, and Barère to suppress revolt and discontent by _noyades_ and _mitraitlades_, if fiendish, is intelligible. It had a political aim. It satisfied a definite if diabolical desire. But the executions of veteran philosophers, of grey-haired parish-priests, of harmless nuns--the deliberate cold-blooded cruelty which punished with death the resentment, the imprudence, often the mere birth, of orphaned lads; the prayers or the tears of schoolgirls who might well hav urged the piteous plea of Sejanus' infant daughter--these recal the indiscriminate ferocity of wild beasts, the atrocities occasionally committed by destructive maniacs in an excess of fury, or the infectious frenzies of lycanthropy and similar forms of epidemic madness, rather than such human cruelty as prompted the massacre of Drogheda, the butchery of Melos, or the destruction of Carthage. What could schoolboys have done worthy of the guillotine, even in the eyes of the Jacobin Club? Girls, like children, can try the temper and patience of manhood, and among rough men or in rough times get roughly punished; but when, save in 1793, did men ever think of killing them? There was but one fault besides their birth--a fault almost inseparable from their birth--which the boy-ensigns and pages, the convent-bred demoiselles, shared with their parents; that inalienable, instinctive, inborn grace, that sense, air, and bearing of superiority, which we find acknowledged alike by the noble and the _bourgeois_, the _von Adel_ and the _bürger_, acknowledged by those who regret or resent as distinctly as by those who would uphold it. The unpardonable sin of the _noblesse_, the inheritance of which they could not be deprived but with their lives, the secret sting that maddened the Jacobin to slay not merely the beardless heirs but the innocent and helpless daughters of the captured chateau, may perhaps be hinted in a question and answer like the following, between Senior and De Tocqueville, after the third Revolution had proved its impotence to efface the footmarks of nature:--
'I said that I was told that the distinction between noble and _roturier_ existed in its full force in real life.