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BOOK VII.

THE REIGN OF TERROR.

CHAPTER I.

Qui suis-je, moi qu’on accuse? Un esclave de la Liberté, un martyr vivant de la République.! — Discours de ROBESPIERRE, 8 Thermidor.

Ir roars, —the River of Hell, whose first outbreak was chanted as the gush of achannel to Elysium. How burst into blossoming hopes fair hearts that had nourished themselves on the diamond dews of the rosy dawn, when Liberty came from the dark ocean, and the arms of decrepit Thraldom, — Aurora from the bed of Tithon! Hopes! ye have ripened into fruit, and the fruit is gore and ashes! Beautiful Roland, eloquent Vergniaud, visionary Condorcet, high-hearted Malesherbes! — wits, philosophers, statesmen, patriots, — dreamers! behold the millennium for which ye dared and labored! I invoke the ghosts! Saturn hath devoured his children,? and lives alone, — in his true name of Moloch! It is the Reign of Terror, with Robespierre the king. The struggles between the boa and the lion are past:

1 Who am I, —Z whom they accuse? A slave of Liberty, —a living martyr for the Republic. 2 “Ta Révolution est comme Saturne, elle dévorera tous ses enfans.” — VERGNIAUD.

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the boa has consumed the lion, and is heavy with the gorge, — Danton has fallen, and Camille Desmoulins. Danton had said before his death, “ The poltroon Robespierre, —I alone could have saved him. From that hour, indeed, the blood of the dead giant clouded the craft of “ Maximilien the Incorruptible,” as at last, amidst the din of the roused Convention, it choked his voice.!

If, after that last sacrifice, essential, perhaps, to his safety, Robespierre had proclaimed the close of the Reign of Terror, and acted upon the mercy which Danton had begun to preach, he might have lived and died a monarch. But the prisons continued to reek, — the glaive to fall; and Robespierre perceived not that his mobs were glutted to satiety with death, and the strongest excitement a chief could give would be a return from devils into men.

We are transported to a room in the house of Citizen Dupleix, the ménwisier, in the month of July, 1794; or, in the calendar of the Revolutionists, it was the Thermidor of the Second Year of the Republic, One and Indivisible! Though the room was small, it was furnished and decorated with a minute and careful effort at elegance and refinement.

It seemed, indeed, the desire of the owner to avoid at once what was mean and rude, and what was luxurious and voluptuous. It was a trim, orderly, precise grace that shaped the classic chairs, arranged the ample draperies, sank the frameless mirrors into the wall, placed bust and bronze on their pedestals, and filled up the niches here and there with well-bound

1 “Te sang de Danton t’étouffe!” (the blood of Danton chokes thee!) said Garnier de ]1’Aube, when, on the fatal 9th of Thermidor, Robespierre gasped feebly forth, ‘“ Pour la derniere fois, Président des Assassins, je te demande la parole.” (For the last time, President of Assassins, I demand to speak.)

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