صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

by the prudence of policy, flows easily and modelled from his lips. His eloquence, imperative as the law, is now the talent of giving force to reason. His language lights and inspires everything; and though almost alone at this moment, he has the courage to remain alone.

10. He braves envy, hatrea, murmurs, supported by the strong feeling of his superiority. He dismisses with disdain the passions which have hitherto beset him. He will no longer serve them when his cause no longer needs them. He speaks to men now only in the name of his genius. This title is enough to cause obedience to him. His power is based on the assent which truth finds in all minds, and his strength again reverts to him. He contests with all parties, and rises superior to one and all. All hate him because he commands; and all seek him because he can serve or destroy them. He does not give himself up to any one, but negotiates with each; he lays down calmly on the tumultuous element of this assembly the bases of the reformed constitution; legislation, finance, diplomacy, war, religion, political economy, balance of power, every question he approaches and solves, not as Utopian, but as a politician.

11. The solution he gives is always the precise mean between the theoretical and the practical. He places reason on a level with manners, and the institutions of the land in consonance with its habits. He desires the throne to support the democracy; liberty, in the Chambers, and in the will of the nation, one and irresistible in the government. The characteristic of his genius, so well defined, so ill understood, was less audacity than justness. Beneath the grandeur of his expression is always to be found unfailing good sense. His very vices could not repress the clearness, the sincerity of his understanding. At the foot of the tribune, he was a man devoid of shame or virtue; in the tribune, he was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish expenditure, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his powers, the incorrupti bility of his genius.

12. Of all the qualities of a great man of his age, he was only wanting in honesty. The people were not his devotees, but his instruments; his own glory was the god of his idolatry; his faith was posterity; his conscience existed but in his thought; the fanaticism of his idea was quite human; the chilling materialism of his age had crushed in his heart the expansion, force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were, "Sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal sleep." He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts have the brand of immortality. If he had believed in God, he might have died a martyr; but he would have left behind him the religion of reason, and the reign of democracy. Mirabeau, in a word, was the reason of the people; and that is not yet the faith of humanity.

[The funeral obsequies paid to this remarkable man were as gorgeous and imposing as those of a monarch. His death seemed to inspire all parties with universal mourie ing. The various belfries tolled his knell, minute-guns were fired, and the funeral cortege was viewed by two hundred thousand spectators, as it passed to the Pantheon, where his remains were deposited; and this grand and imposing edifice seemed too poor a monument for the idol of the people.]

Death of Marie Antoinette.-Carlyle.

[Although Louis XVI. had accepted the constitution imposed by the Assembly, and pledged himself to observe its provisions, the republican leaders were not satisfied; and under their instigation the Parisian mob rushed to the Tuileries (tweel're), the palace in which the king resided, took it by storm, and compelled the royal occupants to take refuge in the Assembly, by whose orders the king and his family were impris oned. After the Assembly had been dissolved, the National Convention was organized: and this body caused the king to be tried, and sentenced him to death. The sentence was executed in 1793 (Jan. 21). Soon followed the "Reign of Terror," during which Robespierre and his colleagues caused thousands to be guillotined, among whom was the unfortunate Marie Antoinette. The following account of her execution is taken from Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution."]

1. ON Monday, the 14th of October, 1793, a cause is pending in the Palais de Justice, in the new Revolutionary Court, such as those old stone walls never witnessed, the trial of Marie Antoinette. The once brightest of queens, now tarnished, defaced, forsaken, stands here at Fouquier-Tinville's judgmentbar, answering for her life. The indictment was delivered her

last night. To such changes of human fortune what words are adequate? Silence alone'is adequate. . .

2. Marie Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they say, as that hideous indictment was reading, continued calm. "She was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one plays on the piano." You discern, not without interest, across that dim revolutionary bulletin itself, how she bears herself queen-like. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. "You persist, then, in denial ?"-" My plan is not denial; it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that."...

3. At four o'clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other darkening of counsel, the result comes out,-sentence of death! "Have you anything to say?" The accused shook her head without speech. Night's candles are burning out: and with her too time is finishing, and it will be eternity and day. This hall of Tinville's is dark, ill-lighted except where she stands. Silently she withdraws from it, to die.

4. Two processions, or royal progresses, three-and-twenty years apart, have often struck us with a strange feeling of contrast. The first is of a beautiful archduchess and dauphiness, quitting her mother's city, at the age of fifteen, toward hopes such as no other daughter of Eve then had. "On the morrow," says Weber, an eye-witness, "the dauphiness left Vienna. The whole city crowded out; at first with a sorrow which was silent. She appeared: you saw her sink back into her carriage; her face bathed in tears; hiding her eyes now with her handkerchief, now with her hands; several times putting out her head to see yet again this palace of her fathers, whither she was to return no more.

5. "She motioned her regret, her gratitude to the good nation, which was crowding here to bid her farewell. Then arose not only tears, but piercing cries, on all sides. Men and women alike abandoned themselves to such expression of their sorrow.

It was an audible sound of wail, in the streets and avenues of Vienna. The last courier that followed her disappeared, and the crowd melted away." The young imperial maiden of fifteen has now become a worn, discrowned widow of thirty-eight; gray before her time; this is the last procession: "Ten min utes after the trial ended, the drums were beating to arms in all sections; at sunrise the armed force was on foot, cannons getting placed at the extremities of the bridges, in the squares, crossways, all along from the Palais de Justice (pah'la dah zhoos'tees) to the Place de Révolution.

6. By ten o'clock, numerous patrols were circulating in the streets; thirty thousand foot and horse drawn up under arms. At eleven, Marie Antoinette was brought out. She had on an undress of piqué blanc (pe-ka blahng); she was led to the place of execution in the same manner as an ordinary criminal; bound on a cart; accompanied by a constitutional priest in lay dress; escorted by numerous detachments of infantry and cavalry. These, and the double row of troops all along her road, she appeared to regard with indifference. On her countenance there was visible neither abashment nor pride.

7. To the cries of Vive la République and Down with Tyranny, which attended her all the way, she seemed to pay no heed. She spoke little to her confessor. The tri-colored streamers on the house-tops occupied her attention, in the streets du Roule and Saint-Honoré; she also noticed the inscriptions on the house-fronts. On reaching the Place de Révolution her look turned toward the Jardin National, whilom Tuileries; her face at that moment gave signs of lively emotion. She mounted the scaffold with courage enough; at a quarter past twelve her head fell; the executioner showed it to the people, amid universal, long-continued cries of Vive la République.

8. Is there a man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow, wasting ignominy; of thy birth, soft cradled in imperial Schönbrunn, the winds of heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendor; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to

which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment-bar were but the merciful end!

9. Look there, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is gray with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping; the face is stony pale, as one living in death. Mean weeds, which her own hand has mended, attire the queen of the world. The death-hurdle where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop; a people, drunk with vengeance, will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there.

10. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads, the air deaf with their triumph yell. The living dead must shudder with yet one other pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face which she hides with her hands. There is there no heart to say, God pity thee! O think not of these; think of Him whom thou worshippest, the Crucified-who also treading the wine-press alone, fronted sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it and made it holy, and built of it a "sanctuary of sorrow," for thee and all the wretched. Thy path of thorns is nigh ended; one long last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was once so light-where thy children shall not dwell. The head is on the block; the axe rushes-dumb lies the world; that wild yelling world, with all its madness is behind thee.

Panegyric on Marie Antoinette.-Edmund Burke. 1. It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate, without emotion, that elevation and that fall!

2. Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to

« السابقةمتابعة »