restitution of conjugal rights, was
rejected; he appealed against the decision, wrote bitter epigrams on the
judges, and celebrated his wife in some elegies worthy of Tibullas,
under the name of Fanny. From court to court he carried his cause, his
epigrams, and his elegies; till finally, in 1781, the Parliament decided
against him, and the Dame Lebrun was freed for ever from the matrimonial
claim, and the little suppers beside the garret fire. But not for ever
was Grimod free from the vengeance of the virtuous Lebrun. And not for
the last time was heard the shrill voice of the complaining husband by
the fastidious ears of Fanny. A few years passed on--Louis the Sixteenth
was hurried to the scaffold--the golden locks of Marie Antoinette were
defiled with the blood and sawdust, which Young France regarded as the
most acceptable offering to the goddess of liberty; and who is that
sharp-featured little man, sitting in the front row of the spectators of
those heaven-darkening murders, with a red cap on his head, and a
many-stringed harp in his hand, chanting the praises of the murderers,
and exciting the drunken populace to greater horrors? Lebrun. Yes, the
French Pindar is appointed poet-laureate to the guillotine, and has
apartments assigned him at the national cost in the Louvre. Whenever an
atrocity is to be committed, an ode is published, "by order of
authority," to raise the passions of the people to the proper pitch.
When the atrocity is over, another ode is ordered to celebrate the
performers, and congratulate the people on their triumph. When Grimod
was brought before the Convention as one of the oppressors of the
people, and parasites of the aristocracy--a woman, old and trembling,
was leaning on his arm--his personal crimes, if any, were so little
known, that he was on the point of being dismissed from the bar for want
of an accuser. Pindar, in his red cap, with his many-stringed harp in
his hand, was there; and all Helicon glowed like molten lead in his
vindictive heart when he looked at the miserable pair. "What sentence
shall we pass on the person called Grimod, ci-devant sub-collector of
taxes, and the woman beside him, who has aided and abetted him in
several attempts to escape from the censorship of the Committee of
Public Safety?" The accused looked timidly round, in hopes that no
answer would be returned to this routine enquiry, in which case their
safety would have been assured; but red-capped Pindar struc