odies.--Errors of the Girondists.--Escape of Gaudet and others.--The
Jacobins clamor for more blood.--More Girondists executed.--Fate of
Petion and Buzot.--Mystery attending the death of Petion and Buzot.

As the fate of the Girondist party, of which Madame Roland was the
soul, is so intimately connected with her history, we must leave her
in the prison, while we turn aside to contemplate the doom of her
companions. The portentous thunders of the approaching storm had given
such warning to the Girondists, that many had effected their escape
from Paris, and in various disguises, in friendlessness and poverty,
were wandering over Europe. Others, however, were too proud to fly.
Conscious of the most elevated patriotic sentiments, and with no
criminations of conscience, except for sacrificing too much in love
for their country, they resolved to remain firm at their post, and to
face their foes. Calmly and sternly they awaited the onset. This
heroic courage did but arouse and invigorate their foes. Mercy had
long since died in France.

Immediately after the tumult of that dreadful night in which the
Convention was inundated with assassins clamoring for blood,
twenty-one of the Girondists were arrested and thrown into the
dungeons of the Conciergerie. Imprisoned together, and fully conscious
that their trial would be but a mockery, and that their doom was
already sealed, they fortified one another with all the consolations
which philosophy and the pride of magnanimity could administer. In
those gloomy cells, beneath the level of the street, into whose deep
and grated windows the rays of the noonday sun could but feebly
penetrate, their faces soon grew wan, and wasted, and haggard, from
confinement, the foul prison air, and woe.

There is no sight more deplorable than that of an accomplished man of
intellectual tastes, accustomed to all the refinements of polished
life, plunged into those depths of misery from which the decencies
even of our social being are excluded. These illustrious statesmen and
eloquent orators, whose words had vibrated upon the ear of Europe,
were transformed into the most revolting aspect of beggared and
haggard misery. Their clothes, ruined by the humid filth of their
dungeons, moldered to decay. Unwashed, unshorn, in the loss almost of
the aspect of humanity, they became repulsive to each other.
Unsupported by any of those consolations which religion affords, many
hours of the blackest gloom must