your days. You, the deist, the female
philosopher, will recall with regret the cloisters where in your
adolescence you tasted the peace of the elect. In the time of your
supreme trial Buzot's miniature will not console you; it is not his
image you should cover with your {71} kisses. No; that miniature is
not the viaticum for eternity. What you will need is the crucifix, and
you respect the crucifix no longer. And yet your imagination will
evoke the mystic cloister, with its altars decked with flowers, its
painted windows, its penetrating and ineffable poesy. And in thought,
also, you will see the country once more, the harvest time, the month
of the vintage, the poor who come to the door asking for bread and who
go away with blessings on their lips and gratitude in their hearts.
Why have you quitted these honest people? What have you come to do in
the midst of these ferocious Jacobins, who flatter you to-day and will
assassinate you to-morrow? Do you fancy that Marie Antoinette is the
only woman who will be insulted, calumniated, and betrayed? Why do you
seat at your hospitable table this livid-faced Robespierre, who to-day,
perhaps, will address you a madrigal, and to-morrow send you to the
scaffold? You will pay very dear for these false and artificial joys,
these gusts of commonplace vanity, this pride of a parvenu, and the
pleasure of presiding for a few evenings at the dinners given to the
Minister of the Interior in Calonne's dining-room. The Legislative
Assembly, the Jacobin Club, the journals and the ministry, the
souvenirs of Plutarch and the parodies of Jean-Jacques, the noisy crowd
of flatterers who are the courtiers of demagogues as they would have
been the courtiers of kings, these adulators who are going to change
into executioners,--all are vanity! Poor {72} woman, whose power will
be so ephemeral, why do you make yourself a persecutor? You will so
soon be persecuted. Why labor so relentlessly to shake the foundations
of a throne that will bury you beneath its ruins?

{73}

VII.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ROLAND.

Two women find themselves confronted across the chessboard and about to
move the pieces in a terrible game in which each stakes her head, and
each is foredoomed to lose. One is the woman who represents the old
regime--the daughter of the German Caesars, the Queen of France and
Navarre; the other stands for the new regime, the Parisian middle
classes--the daughter of