[1793 A.D.] had lost its bitterness, and insult its poignancy. Her fingers wandered heedlessly over the bar of the chair, like those of a woman who recalls remembrances upon the keys of a harpsichord. She endured the voice of FouquierTinville, but she heard him not. The witnesses were called and interrogated. After each evidence Hermann addressed the accused. She answered with presence of mind, and briefly discussed the evidence as she refuted it. The only error in this defence was the defence itself.

The answers of Marie Antoinette compromised no one. She offered herself alone to the hatred of her enemies; and generously shielded all her friends. She evinced her determination not to abandon her sentiments before death, and that if she delivered her head up to the people, she would not yield them her heart to profane. The ignominy of certain accusations sought to dishonour her, even in her maternal feelings. The cynic Hébert, who was heard as a witness upon what had passed at the Temple, imputed acts of depravity and debauchery to the queen, extending even to the corruption of her own son," with the intention," said he, "of enervating the soul and body of that child, and reigning in his name over the ruin of his understanding."

The pious Madame Elizabeth was named as witness and accomplice in these crimes. The indignation of the audience broke out at these words, not against the accused, but against the accuser. Outraged nature aroused itself. The queen made a sign of horror, not knowing how to answer without soiling her lips.

A juryman took up the testimony of Hébert, and asked the accused why she had not replied to this accusation? "I have not answered it," said she, rising with the majesty of innocence, and the indignation of modesty, "because there are accusations to which nature refuses to reply." Afterwards, turning towards the women of the audience, the most enraged against her, and summoning them by the testimony of their hearts and their community of sex, "I appeal against it to all mothers here present," cried she. A shudder of horror against Hébert ran through the crowd. The queen answered with no less dignity to the imputations which were alleged against her of having abused her ascendency over the weakness of her husband. "I never knew that character of him," said she; "I was but his wife, and my duty, as well as my pleasure, was to conform to his will." She did not sacrifice by a single word the memory and honour of the king for the purpose of her own justification, or to the pride of having reigned in his name.

After the closing of these long debates, Hermann summed up the accusation, and declared that the entire French people deposed against Marie Antoinette. He invoked punishment in the name of equality in crime and equality in punishment—and put the question of guilty to the jury. Chauveau-Lagarde and Tronson du Coudray, in their defence, excited posterity without being able to affect the audience or the judges. The jury deliberated for form's sake, and returned to the hall after an hour's interval. The queen was called to hear her sentence. She had already heard it in the stamping and joy of the crowd, which filled the palace. She listened to it without uttering a single word, or making any motion. Hermann asked her if she had anything to say upon the pain of death being pronounced upon her. She shook her head, and arose as if to walk to her execution. She disdained to reproach the people with the rigour of her destiny and with their cruelty. She wrapped herself in that silence which was her last protection. Ferocious applause followed her even to the staircase which descends from the tribunal to the prison.

[1793 A.D.]

THE LAST HOURS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

The first light of day began to struggle under these vaults with the flambeaux with which the gendarmes lighted their steps. It was four in the morning. Her last day had commenced. She was placed, while awaiting the hour of punishment, in the dark hall wherein the condemned await the executioner. She asked the jailer for ink, paper, and a pen, and wrote the following letter to her sister, which was found afterwards amongst the papers of Couthon, to whom Fouquier-Tinville rendered homage, by these curiosities of death and relics of royalty.

This 15th October, at half-past four in the morning.

I write you, my sister, for the last time. I have been condemned, not to an ignominious death, that only awaits criminals, but to go and rejoin your brother. Innocent as he, I hope to show the same firmness as he did in these last moments. I grieve bitterly at leaving my poor children; you know that I existed but for them and you-you who have by your friendship sacrificed all to be with us. Let my son never forget the last words of his father. I repeat them to him expressly: "Let him never attempt to avenge our death!"

I die in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion; in that of my fathers; in that in which I have been bred, and which I have always professed, having no spiritual consolation to expect, not knowing if priests of this religion still exist here- and even the place in which I am would expose them too much, were they once to enter it. I sincerely ask pardon of God for all the errors I may have committed during my life. I hope that, in his kindness, he will accept my last vows, as well as those I have long since made, that he may vouchsafe to receive my soul in his mercy and goodness. I ask pardon of all those with whom I am acquainted, and of you, my sister, in particular, for all the trouble which, without desiring it, I may have caused you. I forgive all my enemies the evil they have done me. I say here adieu to my aunts, and to all my brothers and sisters. I had friends, and the idea of being separated forever from them and their sorrows causes me the greatest regret I experience in dying. Let them, at least, know that in my last moments I have thought of them. Adieu, my good and kind sister! May this letter reach you! Think of me always! I embrace you with all my heart, as well as those poor and dear children. My God, how heartrending it is to quit them forever! Adieu! Adieu! I ought no longer to occupy myself, but with my spiritual duties. As I am not mistress of my actions, they may bring me perhaps a priest. But I here protest that I will not tell him one word, and that I will treat him absolutely as a stranger.

This letter being finished, she kissed each page repeatedly, as if they could transmit the warmth of her lips and the moisture of her tears to her children. She folded it without sealing it, and gave it to the concierge Bault. He remitted it to Fouquier-Tinville.

There were constitutional priests. Three amongst them presented themselves during the night at the Conciergerie, and timidly offered their ministry to the queen. One was the constitutional curate of St. Landry, named Girard; another, one of the vicars of the bishop of Paris; the third, an Alsatian priest, named Lothringer. The schism with which they were infected was, in her eyes, one of the stains of the republic. The seemliness of their manners and conversation, however, touched the queen. She coloured her refusal with an expression of gratitude and regret. But the abbé Lothringer persisted in his charity, which more resembled an obligation than a holy work.

Marie Antoinette was only resolved to die as a Christian, as her husband had died, and as her angelic sister, whom she had left as a mother to her children, lived. This sister had procured for her, in secret, a consolation which her piety deemed a necessity of salvation. It was the number and the floor of a house in the rue St. Honoré, before which the condemned passed, and in which a Catholic priest would be on the day of punishment, at the hour of execution, to bestow upon her, from above, and unknown to the people, the absolution and benediction of God. The queen relied on this invisible sacrament, to die in the faith of her race and in reconciliation with heaven.

H. W.- VOL. XII. Y

[1793 A.D.]

The queen, after having written and prayed, slept soundly for some hours. On her awakening, the daughter of Madame Bault dressed and adjusted her hair with more neatness and respect for exterior appearance than on other days. Marie Antoinette cast off the black robe she had worn since her husband's death, and dressed herself in a white gown. A white handkerchief covered her shoulders, a white cap her hair. A black ribbon which bound this cap around her temples alone recalled to the world her mourning, to herself her widowhood, and to the people her immolation.

The windows and the parapets, the roofs and the trees were loaded with spectators. A crowd of women enraged against "the Austrian" pressed round the gratings, and even into the courts. A pale cold autumn fog hung over the Seine, and permitted, here and there, some rays of the sun to glitter upon the roofs of the Louvre and upon the tower of the palace. At eleven o'clock the gendarmes and the executioners entered the hall of the condemned. The queen embraced the daughter of the concierge, cut her hair off herself, allowed herself to be bound without a murmur, and issued with a firm step from the Conciergerie. No feminine weakness, no faintness of heart, no trembling of the body, nor paleness of features were apparent. Nature obeyed her will, and lent her all its power to die as a queen.

She

On entering from the staircase to the court, she perceived the cart of the condemned, towards which the gendarmes directed her steps. stopped, as if to retrace her road, and made a motion of astonishment and horror. She had thought that the people would have clothed their hatred somewhat decently, and that she would be conducted to the scaffold, as the king was, in a close carriage. Having compressed this emotion, she bowed her head in token of assent, and ascended the cart. The abbé Lothringer placed himself behind her, notwithstanding her refusal.

The cortège left the Conciergerie amidst cries of "Vive la République!" "Place à l'Autrichienne!" "Place à la veuve Capet!" "A bas la tyrannie!" The comedian Grammont, aide-de-camp of Ronsin, gave the example and the signal to the people, brandishing his naked sword, and parting the crowd by the breast of his horse. The hands of the queen being bound, deprived her of support against the jolting of the cart upon the pavement. She endeavoured by every means to preserve her equilibrium, and the dignity of her attitude. "These are not your cushions of Trianon," shouted some wretches to her. The cries, the looks, the laughter, and gestures of the people overwhelmed her with humiliation. Her cheeks changed continually from purple to paleness, and revealed the agitation and reflex of her blood. Notwithstanding the care she had taken of her toilette, the tattered appearance of her dress, the coarse linen, the common stuff and the crumpled plaits dishonoured her rank. The curls of her hair escaped from her cap and flapped with the breeze upon her forehead. Her red and swollen eyes, though dry, revealed the long inundation of care augmented by tears. She bit her under lip for some moments with her teeth, as a person who suppressed the utterance of acute suffering.

When she had crossed the Pont-au-Change, and the tumultuous quarters of Paris, the silence and serious aspect of the crowd bespoke another region of the people. If it was not pity, it was at least dismay. Her countenance regained the calm and uniformity of expression which the outrages of the multitude had at first disturbed. She thus traversed slowly the whole length of the rue St. Honoré. The priest placed on the long seat by her side endeavoured in vain to call her attention, by words which she seemed to repel from her ears. Her looks wandered, with all their intelligence, over

[1793 A.D.]

the façades of the houses, over the republican inscriptions, and over the costumes and physiognomy of this capital, so changed to her since sixteen months of captivity. She regarded above all the windows of the upper stories, from which floated the tricoloured banner, the ensign of patriotism.

The people thought, and witnesses have written, that her light and puerile attention was attracted to this exterior decoration of republicanism. Her thoughts were different. Her eyes sought a sign of safety amongst these signs of her loss. She approached the house which had been pointed out to her in her dungeon. She examined with a glance the window whence was to descend upon her head the absolution of a disguised priest. A gesture, inexplicable to the multitude, made him known to her. She closed her eyes, lowered her forehead, collected herself under the invisible hand which blessed her; and, being unable to use her bound hands, she made the sign of the cross upon her breast, by three movements of her head. The spectators thought that she prayed alone, and respected her fervency. An inward joy and secret consolation shone from this moment upon her

countenance.

On entering upon the place de la Revolution, the leaders of the cortège caused the car to approach as near as possible to the Pont Tournant, and stopped it for a short time before the entrance of the gardens of the Tuileries. Marie Antoinette turned her head on the side of her ancient palace, and regarded for some moments that odious and yet dear theatre of her greatness and of her fall. Some tears fell upon her knees. All her past life appeared before her in the hour of death. Some few more turns of the wheels, and she was at the foot of the guillotine. The priest and the executioner assisted her to descend, sustaining her by the elbows. She mounted the steps of the ladder. On reaching the scaffold, she inadvertently trod upon the executioner's foot. This man uttered a cry of pain. "Pardon me," she said to him, in a tone of voice as if she had spoken to one of her courtiers. She knelt down for an instant and murmured a half-audible prayer; afterwards rising, "Adieu once again, my children," said she, regarding the towers of the Temple, "I go to rejoin your father." She did not attempt, like Louis XVI, to justify herself before the people, nor to move them by an appeal to his memory. Her features did not wear, like those of her husband, the impression of the anticipated bliss of the just and the martyr, but that of disdain for mankind and a proper impatience to depart from life.

The executioner, trembling more than she, was seized with a tremor which checked his hand when disengaging the axe. The head of the queen fell. The assistant of the guillotine took it up by the hair and made the round of the scaffold, raising it in his right hand and showing it to the people. A long cry of "Vive la République!" saluted the decapitated member and already senseless features.

The Revolution believed itself avenged; it was only disgraced. This blood of a woman recoiled upon its glory, without cementing its liberty. Paris, however, felt less emotion at this murder than at that of the king. Public opinion affected an indifference to one of the most odious executions that disgraced the republic. This sacrifice of a queen and a foreigner, amongst a people who had adopted her, had not even the compensation of tragical events - the remorse and grief of a nation.

Thus died this queen, frivolous in prosperity, sublime in misfortune, intrepid upon the scaffold, the idol of a court, mutilated by the people, long the love, and afterwards the blind counsellor, of royalty, and latterly the personal enemy of the Revolution. This Revolution the queen knew neither

[1793 A.D.] how to foresee, to comprehend, nor to accept; she knew only how to irritate and to fear it. She took refuge in the court, in place of throwing herself into the bosom of the people. The people cast on her unjustly all the hatred with which they persecuted the ancient régime. They attached all the scandal and treason of the court to her name. Omnipotent, by her beauty and by her wit, over her husband, she invested him with her unpopularity, and dragged him, by her love, to his destruction. Her vacillating policy, following the impressions of the moment, by turns timid in defeat, and rash in success, neither knew how to recede nor to advance at the proper moment; and ended by converting itself into intrigues with the emigration party and with foreign powers. The charming and dangerous favourite of an antiquated, rather than the queen of a new, monarchy, she had neither the prestige of ancient royalty-respect; nor the prestige of a new reignpopularity; she knew only how to fascinate, to mislead, and to die. Called by a people to occupy a throne, that people did not even grant her a tomb. For we read upon the register of the general interments, in La Madeleine, "For the coffin of the widow Capet, seven francs."

Behold the total of the life of a queen, and of the enormous sums expended during a prodigal reign for the splendour, the pleasures, and bounties of a woman who had possessed Versailles, St. Cloud, and Trianon. When providence desires to address men with the rude eloquence of royal vicissitudes, it speaks with a sign more powerful than the eloquent discourses of Seneca and Bossuet, and inscribes a vile cipher upon the register of a grave-digger! d