popular, had all laboured strenuously to vindicate him. And thus
it befell that the one man the Queen had aimed at crushing was the only
person connected with the affair who came out of it unhurt. The Queen's
animus against the Cardinal aroused against her the animus of his
friends of all classes. Appalling libels of her were circulated
throughout Europe. It was thought and argued that she was more deeply
implicated in the swindle than had transpired, that Madame de la Motte
was a scapegoat, that the Queen should have stood her trial with the
others, and that she was saved only by the royalty that hedged her.

Conceive what a weapon this placed in the hands of the men of the new
ideas of liberty--men who were bent on proving the corruption of a
system they sought to destroy!

Marie Antoinette should have foreseen something of this. She might have
done so had not her hatred blinded her, had she been less intent upon
seizing the opportunity at all costs to make Rohan pay for his barbed
witticism upon her mother. She might have been spared much had she but
spared Rohan when the chance was hers. As it was, the malevolent echoes
of the affair and of Saint-Just's exultation were never out of her
ears. They followed her to her trial eight years later before the
revolutionary tribunal. They followed her to the very scaffold, of which
they had undoubtedly supplied a plank.

VIII, THE NIGHT OF TERROR--The Drownings At Nantes Under Carrier

The Revolutionary Committee of the city of Nantes, reinforced by some
of the administrators of the district and a few members of the People's
Society, sat in the noble hall of the Cour des Comptes, which
still retained much of its pre-republican sumptuousness. They sat
expectantly--Goullin, the attorney, president of the committee, a
frail, elegant valetudinarian, fierily eloquent; Grandmaison, the
fencing-master, who once had been a gentleman, fierce of eye and
inflamed of countenance; Minee, the sometime bishop, now departmental
president; Pierre Chaux, the bankrupt merchant; the sans-culotte Forget,
of the People's Society, an unclean, ill-kempt ruffian; and some thirty
others called like these from every walk of life.

Lamps were lighted, and under their yellow glare the huddled
company--for the month was December, and the air of the vast room was
chill and dank--looked anxious and ill at ease.

Suddenly the doors were thrown open by an usher; and his voice rang loud
in annou