who nor how, but God send
us better, for the tailles and the dues grind us to the earth.' It was
such hapless drudges as this who replenished the Queen's gaming tables
at Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the burden of their harassed
and desperate days, less like men and women than beasts of the field
wrung and tortured and mercilessly overladen, in order that the Queen
might gratify her childish passion for diamonds, or lavish money and
estates on worthless female Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at a
cost of five hundred louis a night at lansquenet and the faro bank. The
Queen, it is true, was in all this no worse than other dissipated women
then and since. She did not realise that it was the system to which she
had stubbornly committed herself, that drove the people of the fields to
cut their crops green to be baked in the oven, because their hunger
could not wait; or made them cower whole days in their beds, because
misery seemed to gnaw them there with a duller fang. That she was
unconscious of its effect, makes no difference in the real drift of her
policy; makes no difference in the judgment that we ought to pass upon
it, nor in the gratitude that is owed to the stern men who rose up to
consume her and her court with righteous flame. The Queen and the
courtiers, and the hard-faring woman of Mars-le-Tour, and that whole
generation, have long been dust and shadow; they have vanished from the
earth, as if they were no more than the fire-flies that the peasant of
the Italian poet saw dancing in the vineyard, as he took his evening
rest on the hillside. They have all fled back into the impenetrable
shade whence they came; our minds are free; and if social equity is not
a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most barbarous
and execrable of causes.

* * * * *

Let us return to the shaping of the Constitution, not forgetting that
its stability was to depend upon the Queen. Robespierre left some
characteristic marks on the final arrangements. He imposed upon the
Assembly a motion prohibiting any member of it from accepting office
under the Crown for a period of four years after the dissolution.
Robespierre from this time forth constantly illustrated a very singular
truth; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in humanity in general
seems always to beget the sharpest distrust of all human beings in
particular. He proceeded further in the same direction. It was