LIEUT. AUDUBON, REVOLUTIONIST 



history and would probably never have become a pio- 

 neer naturalist in America. Baco, disregarding the 

 advice of his military chiefs, immediately placarded the 

 walls of Nantes decreeing death to any who should 

 suggest capitulation, and called all the inhabitants to 

 arms, sparing neither woman nor child. The Vendeans 

 had met their match, for they were dealing with many 

 of their own blood, but though the siege began in early 

 March, they were not effectually dispersed until the end 

 of June, and then only after much bloodshed without 

 the walls. When the immediate crisis had passed, the 

 Constitution of the Republic was unanimously accepted 

 by the eighteen sections of Nantes, on the twenty-first 

 day of July, 1792. 



A few months later in that fateful year a more ter- 

 rible calamity befell the city, when the reign of terror 

 under the notorious ultra-revolutionist, Jean B. Carrier, 

 began. Carrier reached Nantes on October 8 and at 

 once proposed to exterminate both the Vendean royal- 

 ists and their Nantais sympathizers. He reorganized 

 the entire administration to suit his purposes, and to 

 carry out his plans recruited from the lowest classes a 

 revolutionary army to spy upon, denounce and arrest 

 private citizens, many of whom were sent to Paris for 

 trial when not secretly dispatched. The whole district 

 was soon paralyzed by the barbarity of the crimes then 

 committed, and the unhappy Vendeans were dragged to 

 Nantes, to be shot, guillotined or drowned, in such num- 

 bers that the city was unable to bury its dead or the 

 river to discharge them to the sea. Thus perished thou- 

 sands, uncounted if not unknown, and the pestilence of 

 typhoid fever that immediately followed claimed an- 

 other heavy toll regardless of political sympathies. 

 While these dire scenes were being enacted, Jean Jacques 



