which the courage of fifty armed men could have prevented
with ease.... It is not the first night that astonishes me; but four
days!--and inquisitive people going to see this spectacle! No, I know
nothing in the annals of the most barbarous peoples which can compare
with these atrocities."

What a striking lesson for those who play with anarchical passions and
end by falling themselves into the snares they have laid for others!
Nothing is more deserving of study than this retaliatory punishment
which is found, one may say, on every page of revolutionary histories.
The hour was coming when the Girondins and their heroine would repent
of the means they had employed to overset the throne. This was when
the same means were employed against them, when they recognized their
own weapons in the wounds they received. Then, when they had no more
interest in keeping silence, they sought to escape a complicity that
gained them nothing. Instead of the luminous heights which in their
golden dreams they had aspired to gain, they fell, crushed and
overwhelmed, into a dismal gulf, full of tears and blood. How bitter
then were their recriminations against men and things! It was only to
virtue that the dying Brutus said: "Thou art but a name." The
Girondins said it also to glory, to country, and to liberty. Those
among them who did not succeed in fleeing, disavowed, denounced, and
insulted each other before the revolutionary tribunal. At the {380}
Conciergerie they intoned the Marseillaise, but parodying the demagogic
chant in this wise:--

Contre nous de la tyrannie[1]
Le _couteau_ sanglant est leve.

Read the Memoirs of Louvet, Buzot, Barbaroux, Petion, and Madame
Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of
deceived ambition can go. They are paroxysms of rage, howls of anger,
shrieks of despair. Consider the difference between philosophy and
religion! The philosophers curse, and the Christian pardons. Yes, as
Edgar Quinet has said, "Louis XVI. alone speaks of forgiveness on that
scaffold to which the others were to bring thoughts of vengeance and
despair. And by that he seems still to reign over those who were to
follow him in death with the passions and the furies of earth." Louis
XVI. will be magnanimous and calm. A celestial sweetness will
overspread his royal countenance. An infernal rage will distort the
heart and the features of the Girondins. What pains, what tortures, in