LIEUT. AUDUBON, REVOLUTIONIST 75 
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 
