Their treatment of the Queen is indeed the greatest among the many great stains on the revolutionists, and it is strange that men who did not want intellectual acute ness, if they possessed no moral sensibilities, were blind to what an enduring monument they were building to their own infamy. Strange too that they should have been so blind in their hatred to her as not to see that they were doing what would make all her earlier thoughtlessness, and some other faults from which she was not exempt, be forgotten and forgiven her by posterity. For her memory is now kept very tenderly in the hearts of almost all. Never persecute your enemies to martyrdom, is a maxim which, even where higher and nobler feelings are unknown, should weigh with men, if they are not mere savages, as a worldly-wise one. As regards the policy of those who acted in the matter from policy, such as it was, and "in the hope to prove to their enemies that they were not afraid," we shall only say that it was the vain policy of cowards and bullies; while as to the blot left not merely on the revolutionists, but on France, by the execution of the Queen, we shall not say a word; the eloquence of Burke has made it patent forever. She was buried, as her husband had been, in the cemetery of the Madeleine de la Villel'Evêque, where indeed most of the bodies carried from the guillotine were interred. The receipt for the price of the coffin furnished for "Widow Capet," as she is designated in the document, is still extant, we believe. In 1815 search was made for the royal remains; some traces of them were found or were supposed to be found, and these were removed to St. Denis. And the cemetery above mentioned then became the site of what is called the Expiatory Chapel.

The next great scene on the Place was the execution of the Girondists. It took place on the 31st October, 1793, twentyone of that party paying on that day the penalty of being more moderate than the rest of the Convention. Their story from first to last has been eloquently written, and on the whole fairly estimated, by Lamartine; we need not dwell upon it here. The Revolutionary Tribunal now first received that name and was brought into full operation, though essentially it

VOL. XLVIII.-NO. I.

Let us note here, that all along, while the guillotine was in permanent play, the people of Paris were amusing themselves as usual. The theaters, for instance, were as crowded as ever; and as in the infamous massacres of September, 1792, "while hundreds of arms were weary with slaying, hundreds of arms were weary with fiddling," so all along the usual drama of the stage went on side by side with the terrible drama of reality. We have before us lists of the plays performed at different theaters on some of the days we have mentioned. On the evening of the day on which the King was executed, pieces entitled, Amorous Follies, The Prodigal Son, Unforeseen Events, The Friend of the Family, and Molière's Médecin malgré lui, were amongst those presented. From witnessing the death of Charlotte Corday, people went to see Orpheus and Eurydice, The Judgment of Paris, The Conciliator, The Club of Sans Souci, or perhaps Arlequin Cruello; from hooting at the Queen on her way to the scaffold, the Parisians met to enjoy The Offering to Liberty, and the ballet of Telemachus at the Opera, or to laugh at The Mistress Servant, and the three hundred and fiftieth representation of Nicodemus in the Moon, at the Théâtre Français of the Rue de Bondi. On the night that followed the sacrifice of the Girondists, one theater gave Allons, ça ira; another, The Forced Revenge; the Théâtre de la République, as if in mockery, The_Moderate Man. Yet every where was Terror! The explanation of the apparent inconsistency involves a curious philosophical investigation on which we of course can not here enter.

The next on our list is Egalité, the Duke of Orleans. His life had been infamous; his orgies in the Palais-Royal had shown his moral character; his conduct in the action off Ushant, against the British fleet under Keppel, had caused him to be accused of wanting what has rarely if ever been wanting in his family, physical courage; of moral courage his vote for the death of his royal cousin had proved him to be wholly devoid. this man, we are told, went to the scaffold calmly, and died with dignity and firmness; a proof how easily the "stoic vir

4

Yet

that his own head fell, it was worth showing to the people, as he said himself. He was just thirty-five years of age; Camille Desmoulins only thirty-two. The wife of the latter, the beautiful, tender, and devoted Lucile, with a lock of whose hair in his hand he died, sought to share his fate, and was not disappointed. Ten days later, on the pretense of being concerned in a supposed plot called the Conspiracy of the Prisons, she too was condemned and executed.

And now came the very spring-tide of blood. Up to as many as seventy heads would fall in one day it was in contemplation, just when the Reign of Terror was suddenly brought to a close, that a hundred and fifty should be the daily number. And it was no longer the higher classes only, or prominently obnoxious individuals, who were sacrificed; the proscriptions had descended through every rank to the very lowest, and no degree of obscurity was a guarantee of safety; the classified lists of the sufferers show an extraordinary proportion of small tradespeople, workmen, and day-laborers. Farther, discrimination had become impossible, not only of the alleged offense but even as to the identity of the accused; and cases of sheer blunder in this way must have been frequent, and would have been so even if the trials had not been made mere mockeries intentionally. Finally, the tyrants of the hour showed a de. gree of vindictiveness unparalleled except occasionally in the barbarous East. For instance, a young woman, named Cecile Renaud, having formed a design against the life of Robespierre, which, had she succeeded in carrying it into execution, would probably have made her more famous than even Charlotte Corday, was condemned to death for it, and guillotined. But not she alone: the whole of her kindred, to the number of sixty, suffered death because of her; among them being some young men who at the very time were bravely fighting on the frontiers in defense of their country.

And now, too, while obscurity was no protection, the highest virtues seemed actually to mark the possessor of them as proper for the guillotine. Malesherbes, the noble old man, who, at the age of seventy-two, from the retirement into which he had been driven before the Revolution, on the rejection of his wise counsels by the Court, emerged so generously

and intrepidly to defend the King on his trial, was now put to death; and along with him his whole family, without a single exception. A monument, completed in 1826, was erected to his memory in the Palais de Justice by Louis XVIII.; and the inscription on it, from the well-qualified hand of that King himself, aptly characterizes him: "Strenue, semper fidelis regi suo, in solio veritatem, praesidium in carcere attulit." A noble fidelity indeed; the double nobleness of which was rewarded by disgrace in the one instance, and death in the other, as the faithful old man knew well beforehand it would be.

A fortnight after Malesherbes, a man illustrious in another way shared his fate the celebrated Lavoisier, one of the founders of modern chemical science. His offense was his having been a farmer-general of taxes. Thirty others of that class, not all of whom it is probable were so innocent as he, were executed at the same time. The specific charge against him was that he had adulterated some tobacco. After his condemnation, he asked for a short respite that he might complete some experiments in which he had been engaged when arrested; his judges refused the application, with the characteristic remark, "that the Republic had no need of chemists." Other ornaments of their age, such for instance as André Chenier, might be mentioned among the victims; but we shall now only notice what was the crowning crime of the Revolution, the execution of the sister of Louis XVI., Madame Elizabeth; the excellent woman, the blameless princess, who at the age of thirty years and eight days, after a rigorous imprisonment of twenty-one months in the Temple, expiated on the scaffold her sole offense-her being of royal blood. All along her passage to the guillotine, incredible as it may seem, she was hooted by the infamous and dastardly crowd; her serenity, however, did not fail her for a moment, nor her firmness. She stood on the platform while twenty-four other distinguished prisoners of either sex were put to death before her; they, as the turn of each came, making her a respectful obeisance, which she acknowledged with affectionate signs of recognition. She died as she had lived, without fear, because without reproach.

Shortly after this, the people inhabiting the neighborhood of the Place began, callous as they were, to murmur at the

it, and at last, for a change, Robespierre had it removed tothe Barrière du Trône. Thence, on the twenty-eighth July, 1794, it was brought back to its old site for his own execution.

This made the catastrophe of the terrible tragedy. With Robespierre, of whom we need here say no more, since of his real character, completely misunderstood at the time, a more correct estimate has latterly come to be formed, perished twentyone other members of the commune; among whom we may notice, as represent ing two extremes, St. Just, the cold apostle of unmitigated Reason; and Simon, the representative of Passion in its most debased and brutal form of sheer cruelty. This wretch, it will be remembered, was the shoemaker to whose tender mercies the poor young Dauphin was committed, "to be got rid of;" not violently, but by systematic ill-usage of mind and body. Within a week after, above a hundred real or supposed accomplices of Robespierre were guillotined. It is not to be forgotten, as evidencing the spirit of the time, that the whole family of the Duplays, with the exception of the mother, she having already been murdered in her own house by female furies, were involved in his fate; merely inasmuch as it had been with them he had lodged, and that one of the daughters was to have been his wife. So that the very men who were punishing the atrocities of the Terrorists, thus rivaled them at that very moment in their iniquity.

other illustrations of the same significance might be given. To offer only one: Where are now the chiefs of the French Revolution of 1848? The fruit of that revolution still exists, and visibly enough, in the present empire and its natural consequences; but where are the revolutionists of February? Where is Lamartine? Where Ledru - Rollin? Where Louis Blanc? Where are the other members of the Provisional Government? Historical events may resemble each other without being identical in details; and in 1848, the guillotine was not as before brought into action. But while they have physi cally survived, what else are those men now but politically dead and buried? It was somewhat curious, we may say in passing, to see how in 1848 one of the first acts of the Provisional Government was to declare that the punishment of death for political offenses was abolished. Certainly some among them were actuated by the purest motives possible, and in that their act they were only following out the conviction of their lives; but with others it was, we think, very much a measure of precaution, prompted by the instinct which whispered to them that very soon, in the gyrations of the Revolution, they might find themselves on the lower side of the wheel.