about one hundred men to be tried by a Court Martial; in other words, to be butchered in cold blood. This horrid deed, the blackest, perhaps, which has stained the French name during their whole career of conquest, was performed at the fall of day. A mock tribunal of French officers, having ascertained that no person of note was among the destined victims, ordered them to be led out of the Retiro, the place of their short confinement, into the Prado, where they were despatched by the soldiers.

Ignorant of the real state of the town, and hearing that the tumult had ceased, I ventured out in the afternoon towards the Puerta del Sol, where I expected to learn some particulars of the day. The cross streets which led to that place were unusually empty; but as I came to the entrance of one of the avenues which open into that great rendezvous of Madrid, the bustle increased, and I could see an advanced guard of French soldiers formed two-deep across the street, and leaving about one-third of its breadth open to such as wished to pass up and down. At some distance behind them, in the irregular square which bears the name of the Sun's Gate, I distinguished two pieces of cannon, and a very strong division of troops. Less than this hostile display would have been

sufficient to check my curiosity, if, still possessed with the idea that it was not the interest of the French to treat us like enemies. I had not, like many others who were on the same spot, thought that the peaceful inhabitants would be allowed to proceed unmolested about the streets of their town. Under this impression I went on without hesitation, till I was within fifty yards of the advanced guard. Here a sudden cry of aux armes, raised in the square, was repeated by the soldiers before me, the officer giving the command to make ready. The people fled up the street in the utmost consternation; but my fear having allowed me, instantly, to calculate both distances and danger, I made a desperate push towards the opening left by the soldiers, where a narrow lane, winding round the Church of San Luis, put me in a few seconds out of the range of the French muskets. No firing however being heard, I concluded that the object of the alarm was to clear the streets at the approach of night.

The increasing horror of the inhabitants, as they collected the melancholy details of the morning, would have accomplished that end, without any farther effort on the part of the oppressors. The bodies of some of their victims seen in several places; the wounded that were met about the streets; the visible anguish

of such as missed their relations; and the spreading report that many were awaiting their fate at the Retiro, so strongly and painfully raised the apprehensions of the people, that the streets were absolutely deserted long before the approach of night. Every street-door was locked, and a mournful silence prevailed wherever I directed my steps. Full of the most gloomy ideas, I was approaching my lodgings by a place called Postigo de San Martin, when I saw four Spanish soldiers bearing a man upon a ladder, the ends of which they supported on their shoulders. As they passed near me, the ladder being inclined forward, from the steepness of the street, I recognized the features of my townsman and acquaintance, Daoiz, livid with approaching death. He had lain wounded since ten in the morning, in the place where he fell. He was not quite insensible when I met him. The slight motion of his body, and the groan he uttered as the inequality of the ground, probably, increased his pain, will never be effaced from my memory.

A night passed under such impressions, baffles my feeble powers of description. A scene of cruelty and treachery exceeding all limits of probability had left our apprehensions to range at large, with scarcely any check from the calculations of judgment. The dead silence

of the streets since the first approach of night, only broken by the trampling of horses which now and then were heard passing along in large parties, had something exceedingly dismal in a populous town, where we were accustomed to an incessant and enlivening bustle. The Madrid cries, the loudest and most varied in Spain, were missed early next morning; and it was ten o'clock before a single street-door had been open. Nothing but absolute necessity could induce the people to venture out.

On the third day after the massacre, a note from an intimate friend obliged me to cross the greatest part of the town; but though my way lay through the principal streets of Madrid, the number of Spaniards I met did not literally amount to six. In every street and square of any note I found a strong guard of French infantry, lying beside their arms on the pavement, except the sentinel who paced up and down at a short distance. A feeling of mortified pride mixed itself with the sense of insecurity which I experienced on my approaching these parties of foreign soldiers, whose presence had made a desert of our capital. Gliding by the opposite side of the street, I passed them without lifting my eyes from the ground. Once I looked straight in the face of an inferior officer-a serjeant I believe, wearing the cross of

the Legion d'honneur-who, taking it as an insult, loaded me with curses, accompanied with threats and the most abusive language. The Puerta del Sol, that favourite lounge of the Madrid people, was now the bivouac of a French division of infantry and cavalry, with two twelve-pounders facing every leading street. Not a shop was open, and not a voice heard but such as grated the ear with a foreign

accent.

On my return home, a feeling of deep melancholy had seized upon me, to which the troubles of my past life were lighter than a feather in the scale of happiness and misery. I confined myself to the house for several days, a prey to the most harassing anxiety. What course to take in the present crisis, was a question for which I was not prepared, and in which no fact, no conjecture could lead me. My friend, the friend for whose sake alone I had changed residence, had a mortal aversion to Seville -that town where he could not avoid acting in a detested capacity.* Some wild visions of freedom from his religious fetters had been playing across his troubled mind, while the French approached Madrid; and though he now looked on their conduct with the most

my

* That of a Catholic Clergyman.