Conservative Cabal

A little late, and a little long…

“At Meudon,” says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, “there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made”; for breeches, and other uses.  The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality to shamoy; that of the women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture! - History looking back over Cannibalism, through Purchas’s Pilgrims and all early and late Records, will perhaps find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort, on the whole, so detestable.   It is a manufactured, soft feeling, quietly elegant sort; a sort per fide!  Alas then, is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?  Nature still makes him and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial.

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution