their death-struggle! Earth fails them, and they do not look to
heaven. What accents of disgust and hatred when they speak of their
former accomplices, now become their executioners!

"Great God!" Buzot will say, "if it is only by such men and such
infamous means that republics {381} can arise and be consolidated,
there is no government more frightful on this earth nor more fatal to
human happiness." He will address these insults, worthy of the
imprecations of Camillus, to the city of Paris: "I say truly, that
France can expect neither liberty nor happiness except from the
irreparable destruction of that capital."

Barbaroux will be still more severe. His anathemas are launched not
only at Paris, but at all France. "The people," he says, "do not
deserve that one should become attached to them, for they are
essentially ungrateful. It is the absurdest folly to try to conduct to
liberty people without morals, who blaspheme God and adore Marat.
These people are no more fit for a philosophic government than the
lazzaroni of Naples or the cannibals of America.... Liberty, virtue,
sacred rights of men, to-day you are nothing but empty names." Petion,
before dying, will write to his son this letter, which is like the
testament of the Gironde: "My greatest torment will be to think that so
many crimes went unpunished; vengeance is here the most sacred of
duties.... My son, either the murderers of thy father and thy country
will be delivered to the severities of the law and expiate their crimes
upon the scaffold, or thou art under obligation to free thy country
from them. They have broken all the ties of society; their crimes are
of such a nature that they do not fall under ordinary rules. From such
monsters every one is authorized to purge the earth."

{382}

Madame Roland will be not less vehement than Buzot, Barbaroux, and
Petion. She will address these severe but just reproaches to her
friends who had not been valiant enough in their own defence: "They
temporized with crime, the cowards! They were to fall in their turn,
but they succumb shamefully, pitied by nobody, and with nothing to
expect from posterity but utter contempt.... Rather than obey their
tyrants, than descend from the bar and go out of the Assembly like a
timid flock about to be branded by the butcher, why did they not do
justice to themselves by falling on the monsters to annihilate them
rather than be sentenced by them?" It is not her friend