Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

9

9 (p. 38) Bonapart’s pounding of the Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by our respectable classes “the whiff of grapeshot”: “The Whiff of Grapeshot” is the title of chapter 7 in Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 work The French Revolution (book 3, part 7). In the chapter Carlyle recounts how Napoleon fired with cannons upon a crowd of insurrectionists, killing 200 of them; he asserts that this action marked the end of the French Revolution.