nder the knife of the
guillotine. In October of the same year his unhappy queen shared his
fate.

_THE END OF THE TERROR._

No period of equal length in the whole era of history yields us such a
succession of exciting and startling events as those few years between
the convening of the States-General in France and the rise of Napoleon
to power, and particularly that portion of the Revolution known as the
Reign of Terror. A volume of thrilling stories might have been made from
its incidents alone; but it would have been a volume so full of tales of
blood and woe, of misery and massacre, of the dominance of those
wild-beast passions which civilization seeks to subdue in man, that we
may well be spared the telling. As with the fall of the Bastille began
the long dominion of the populace, so with the fall of Robespierre it
ended, and civil order returned to unhappy France. We have told the
story of the one; we shall conclude with that of the other.

Three men dominated the Terror,--Danton, Marat, and Robespierre; the
first named best deserving the title of man, for he possessed certain
qualities of manliness not shown by his brutal colleagues. As Lamartine
says, "Nothing was wanting to make Danton a great man except virtue." He
had too much manliness, as it seems, for the purposes of Robespierre,
and was brought by him to the guillotine on April 5, 1794.

The triumvirate of the Reign of Terror was broken by his death and that
of Marat, who had fallen under the avenging knife of Charlotte Corday in
July, 1793. Robespierre was left sole director of the Revolution, being
president of the Committee of Public Safety, leader of the Jacobin Club,
favorite of the extreme terrorists, and lord and master of the
Convention, whose members were held in subjection by his violence and
their fears.

His dominion was not to be of long continuance. It was signalized by
such a frightful activity of the guillotine, in which multitudes of
innocent persons daily perished, that the terror which he produced was
quickly followed by indignation, and a combination of many of the
leading spirits of the Convention was formed against him. One after
another he had vanquished all his enemies, and stood alone. But he stood
on such a ghastly pyramid of the dead that he could not hope to maintain
his dangerous elevation. The voice of vengeance, long choked by terror,
at length began to rise against this wholesale executioner.

The outbreak was