Note 577 — CANTO THE ELEVENTH.

[Joseph François Foulon, army commissioner, provoked the penalty of the "lantern" (i.e. an improvised gallows on the yard of a lamp-post at the corner of the Rue de la Vannerie) by his heartless sneer, "Eh bien! si cette canaille n'a pas de pain, elle mangera du foin." He was hanged, July 22, 1789. See The Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, cap. xxii.; see, too, Carlyle's French Revolution, 1839, i. 253: "With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in its hundred hands: he is whirled ... to the 'Lanterne,' ... pleading bitterly for life,—to the deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice still pleaded), can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass: amid sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people."]