f their adversaries. The new ideas take fire and spread like a
train of gunpowder. It is the fashion to go to extremes; a nameless
frenzy and fatality seem let loose upon this epoch of agitations and
catastrophes. All those who, at one time or another, have been guests
at the palace of Versailles, are condemned, as by a mysterious
sentence, either to exile or to death.

How will terminate the career of that brilliant King of Sweden, who had
received from Versailles and from Paris, from the court and from the
city, such an enthusiastic reception? Gustavus, the idol of the great
lords, the philosophers, and the fashionable beauties, who, after being
the hero of the encyclopaedists, came to hold his court at {33}
Aix-la-Chapelle amid the French _emigres_, and who, on his return to
Stockholm, prepared there the great crusade for authority, announcing
himself as the avenger of divine right, the saviour of all thrones?
The last days of his life, his presentiments, which recall those of
Caesar, his superstitions, his belief in prophecies, his magic
incantations, that warning which he scorns, as the Duke de Guise did at
the castle of Blois, that masked ball where the costumes, the music,
the flowers, the lights, offer a painfully strange contrast to the
horror of the attack; all is sinister, lugubrious, in these fantastic
and fatal scenes which have already tempted more than one dramatist,
more than one musician, and whose phases a Shakespeare only could
retrace. The crime of Stockholm is linked closely to the
death-struggle of French royalty. The funeral knell which tolled at
this extremity of the North had echoes in Paris. The Swedish regicides
set the example to the regicides of France.

M. Geffroy has remarked very justly in his work, _Gustave III. et la
cour de France_, that the bloody deed which put an end to the reign and
the life of Gustavus is not an isolated fact: "The faults committed by
this Prince would not have sufficed to arm his assassins. The true
source whence Ankarstroem and his accomplices drew their first
inspiration was that vertigo caused during the last years of the
century by the annihilation of all religious and even all philosophical
faith.... No moment of {34} modern history has presented an
intellectual and moral anarchy comparable to that which accompanied the
revolutionary period in Europe."

The eighteenth century was punished for incredulity by superstition.
Having refused to believe