23 Raising a Nation from the Dead their revolt, and runnels of blood ran fresh from the Place de la Concorde, as the national barber, the guillotine, did its swift and efficient work. For a while it seemed as though the very seasons had been sent to the scaffold, and men no longer could reckon time by the great works of God, but by foolish and ugly names invented by the new deities, names like the month of Thermidor. And in their madness they had removed the statue of the Blessed Mother from her cathedral and replaced her with a harlot to whom, without irony, they gave the name of Reason, and honored her as a goddess. No, it was not like that here. In some ways it was worse. It was not the whirlwind. It was the wreckage after the whirlwind. The sun shone and the rain fell and the land yielded its fruit, and men and oxen worked the fields, and children ran about and got into trouble, but it was as if the village had been thrown to the ground by a deaf and dumb spirit. The church on Sunday was empty but for a few old widows in their black country lace. The miller cheated his customers, young men kept knives under their shirts, several men had taken women to their beds without bothering about marriage, every morning saw someone in a drunken sleep in a ditch; and far from the joy of the Faith, there was not even human mirth, but the hard cynical laughter of people who have given up on life. “Let us eat,
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