Though many of the large towns possessed Furies in those days, Paris was their proper home. There they lived on the sight, the smell, the taste of human blood. To picture their history rightly, the pen should be dipped in blood. Blood, since they were denied bread was all they cared for; and when aristocratic heads grew scarce, these fiends turned on one another, like famished wolves, to glut their insatiable thirst. The Guillotine was a central rallying point for the Furies. Round it they danced and sang by day; its steps formed their pillow by night. There they crowded together--Tricoteuses, Fileuses, Poissardes--shouting, gesticulating, screaming the "Marseillaise" or the "Ça Ira" with their wild, demoniac voices, as they watched the red cart deposit its living freight at the foot of the National Razor. When hunger pressed them very sore, they would snatch up swords, pikes, or scythes, and rush in crowds along the narrow, muddy, ill-paved streets, beating drums, waving red flags, brandishing their weapons, to demand bread from those who professed to guide the Republic.
There was always some female leader, brave and eloquent, round whom the Furies would rally, and who was, if possible, more bloodthirsty, more ruthless than the rest. The great leaders of the Parisian Women were Rose Lacombe, the actress, and Théroigne (or Lambertine) de Méricourt, the Amazon of Liége. These two women, equally beautiful, equally brave, and equally popular, had wholly different reasons for plunging into the seething whirlpool of blood. Rose Lacombe (who was born in 1768, and was therefore past twenty when the Revolution broke out), appears to have joined in the scenes of atrocity through a love of excitement, a wish to be a leader, that feeling so natural in the breast of an actress. She was a wild, excitable girl, and although not great on the stage, had a certain fiery eloquence, which, though bombastic, exaggerated, even grotesque, was suited to an audience chiefly gathered from the Halles. Théroigne de Méricourt, however, had quite another object in coming forward as a Republican leader; this was an unquenchable thirst for revenge on the entire aristocracy, to one of whom she owed the shame of her life.