the Seine, a pleasant July morning was present to my imagination,
and a crowd was gathered upon the place to witness an execution. The
slight form of a beautiful woman passes up yonder winding steps to the
block. Her hair is dark--not so dark, though, as her genius-lighted eyes
-and her forehead is white and nobly pure. She kneels, bows down her
head to the block, and is forever dead. It was Charlotte Corday, the
enthusiast, who assassinated Marat in his bath. I have seen the place
where she killed him--have looked at the very threshold where she waited
so long before she gained admittance. The house is standing yet, and the
room where Marat lay in his bath writing--where he looked up from his
manuscript at Charlotte Corday and promised death to some of her dearest
friends in a provincial town--where she plunged her dagger to the center
of his black heart!

It was on the Place de la Concorde that Louis XVI expiated the crimes of
his ancestors upon the scaffold. One still October day the sweet though
proud Marie Antoinette came here, also, to die. The agony that she
suffered during her trial, and the day that she perished upon the
scaffold, no human thought can reckon. The French revolution taught a
fearful lesson to kings and queens; that if they would rule safely, it
must be through the hearts of their subjects, otherwise the vengeance of
an insulted and oppressed people will be sure to overtake them.

One April day, amid sunshine and rain, that man of dark eyes, lofty
brow, and proud stature, the magnificent Danton, walked up the fatal
steps and knelt down to death. How strange! The man before whose nod
all Paris had trembled as if he had been a god--the man whose eloquence
could thrill the heart of France, was now a weak creature beneath the
iron arm of Robespierre. He had sentenced hundreds to death upon this
spot, and was now condemned himself, by his old associate, to taste the
same bitter cup which he had so often held to the lips of others. This
act alone will fix the stain of ferocious cruelty upon the character of
Robespierre, however conscientious he may have been.

And here, too, on that same day, Camille Desmoulins, the mad author and
revolutionist-editor, ended his young life. Many a time with his
comic--yet sometimes awfully tragic--pen, had he pointed with laughter
to the Place de la Concorde, and its streams of human blood. And now the
strange creature who one day laughed wildly in his glee and anothe