"He has said this long time that all that is going on
in France is an imitation of the revolution in England under Charles I.
I begin to dread {249} an impeachment for him. As for me, I am a
foreigner, and they will assassinate me. What will become of my poor
children?" And she fell to weeping. Madame Campan tried to administer
a nervine, but the Queen refused it. "Nervous maladies," said she.
"are the ailments of happy women; I no longer have them." Without her
knowledge a sort of corset, in the style of her husband's plastron, had
been made for her. Nothing could induce her to wear it. To those who
implored her with tears to put it on, she replied: "If seditious
persons assassinate me, so much the better; they will deliver me from a
most sorrowful life."

The fete of the Federation was celebrated in 1792 amidst extremely
tragical preoccupations. Things had changed very greatly since the
fete which had excited such enthusiasm two years earlier. On July 14,
1790, the Champ-de-Mars was filled at four o'clock in the morning by a
crowd delirious with joy. At eight o'clock in the morning of July 14,
1792, it was still empty. The people were said to be at the Bastille
witnessing the laying of the first stone of the column to be erected on
the ruins of the famous fortress. On the Champ-de-Mars there was no
magnificent altar served by three hundred priests, no side benches
covered by an innumerable crowd, none of that sincere and ardent joy
which throbbed in every heart two years before. For the fete of 1792,
eighty-three little tents, representing the departments of the kingdom,
had been erected on hillocks of sand. {250} Before each tent stood a
poplar, so frail that it seemed as if a breath might blow away the tree
and its tri-colored pendant. In the middle of the Champ-de-Mars were
four stretchers covered with canvas painted gray which would have made
a miserable decoration for a boulevard theatre. It was a so-called
tomb, an honorary monument to those who had died or were about to die
on the frontiers. On one side of it was the inscription: "Tremble,
tyrants; we will avenge them!" The Altar of the Country could hardly
be seen. It was formed of a truncated column placed on the top of the
altar steps raised in 1790. Perfumes were burned on the four small
corner altars. Two hundred yards farther off, near the Seine, a large
tree had been set up and named the Tree of Feudalism. From its
branches depend