Part 48

The Jacobins pressed the trial of the king. The mob demanded him as a victim. The Girondists voted with the Jacobins that he was guilty; but they voted to leave the sentence to the determination of the French people, and when they were defeated in this they voted for his death. I am unable to find any thing in the memorials of Madame Roland which shows that she had any sympathy with this. What is written tends rather to show that she was in the very apathy and lassitude of horror. From the time when her courageous effort to work justice upon the abettors and perpetrators of the massacre failed, her history ceases to be political and becomes personal.

The revolutionary tribunal was reorganized, consisting of twenty judges, a jury, and a public accuser. Merlin of Douai, a consummate jurist, proposed a statute, in every line of which suspicion, treachery, and hate found an arsenal of revenge. It provided that: "Immediately after the publication of this present decree, all suspected persons who are found in the territory of the republic, and who are still at liberty, shall be arrested.

"Are deemed suspected all persona who, by their conduct, writings, or language, have proved themselves partisans of tyranny, federalism, and enemies of liberty;

"Those who can not prove they possess the means of existence, and that they have fully performed all of their duties as citizens;

"Those to whom certificates of citizenship have been refused;

"Those of noble families--fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, sisters, husbands, wives, and agents--who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the Revolution."

The traveler, standing upon the stone seats of the Flavian amphitheater, looks down into the arena, and peoples the Coliseum with the criminals and the innocent martyrs, shut out from hope by its merciless walls and by a populace more merciless, and slain by thousands by wild beasts and swordsmen and spearsmen, to make a Roman holiday. How complacently he felicitates himself upon the assumption that modern times present nothing like this. But less than one hundred years ago, the pen of a lawyer erected in France a statute which inclosed a kingdom with its architectural horror, made one arena of an empire, and in one year drank up more blood than sank into the sands of the Coliseum in centuries.

The revolutionary tribunal was in permanent session. Its trials were summary. It heard with predetermination, and decided without evidence. It was the mere routine formality of death. Proof often consisted solely in the identification of the person whose death had been predetermined. Prostitutes sold acquittals, and revenged themselves by convictions. Paris now ruled France, the Jacobins ruled Paris, and the mob ruled the Jacobins. They had pressed the Girondists, those men of lofty genius and superb eloquence, from their high position into complicity with crimes with which they had no sympathy, and this want of sympathy now became their crime. It was resolved to destroy them. The mob of Paris again came forth. Devilish men and women again crowded the assembly, and even took part in its deliberations. The act of accusation was passed, and twenty-six of the leaders of the Gironde went from their places to the scaffold, where they suffered death sublimely.

Madame Roland was also arrested. Her husband had fled from Paris. She was consigned to the prison of St. Pelagie, and afterwards, after suffering the cruel mockery of a release, she was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. This prison was the abiding place of assassins, thieves, and all impurity. It was the anteroom to the scaffold, for incarceration there was an infallible symptom of death. The inmates were crowded into rooms with merciless disregard of their relative characters or antecedents. Madame Roland was first associated with the duchess of Grammont, with a female pick-pocket, with a nun, with an insane woman, and with a street-walker. She finally procured a cell to herself, which she made bloom with flowers. The prison was populous with the most degraded of her sex. Yet she asserted here the same marvelous ascendancy which she had always possessed over her associates. The obscene outcries of lost women died away when she approached. Her cell was an ark of safety for any dove seeking refuge from that deluge of human sin. When she went into the courtyard the lost of her own sex gathered around her with reverence, as around a tutelary and interceding angel, the same women who inflicted upon Madame Du Barry, that princess of their caste, every torment which the malice of their sex could inspire. Inmates and visitors crowded to the door of her cell, and she spoke to them through its iron bars with eloquence, which increased as inspiring death drew near, of liberty, country, equality, and of better days for France, but when they went away she would look through her window to the sky, and, thinking of her hunted husband and sequestered little daughter, cry and moan like the simplest wife and mother. Then she would send by surreptitious conveyance, letters to refugee statesmen, which discussed the political situation as calmly as if written upon the work-table of a secure and peaceful home. Calumny now busied itself to defile her. Hebert, vilest of editors, flung the ordure of Pere Duchesne, vilest of newspapers, upon this spotless woman, soon to be a saint, and sent the newsmen to cry the disgusting charges under her prison windows, so that she heard them rendered in all the villainies of a language whose under-drains have sources of vileness filthier than any other speech of man. She did not fear death, but she did fear calumny. She had never delighted in any public display of her enormous intellectual powers, and she had never made any such display. She had fixed the sentiment of Lyons by an anonymous newspaper article, of which sixty thousand copies had been bought in one day. She had written to the king a letter which drove her husband from power, and which, when read by the people, compelled the king to restore him. She had written a dispatch to the pope, claiming rights for certain French in Rome, in which the sanctity of his office and the dignity of her country was respected, appealed to, and asserted. It is said that the state papers were hers which persuaded William Pitt to abstain so long from intervention in the affairs of France, in that time of English terror and hope, which furnished arguments to Fox, and which drew from Burke those efforts of massive reason and gorgeous imagination which will endure as long as the language itself. The counsel by which she had disentangled the perplexity of wisest men had been repeated by them to applauding senates in tones less eloquent than those by which they had been received, and triumph had followed. In none of these efforts did she avow herself. She shrank from the honors which solicited her, though the world knew that they came from her just as the world knows that moon and planets shine with the reflected light of a hidden sun. But now, when thus assailed, she resolved to speak personally and for herself. And so, sitting in her cell, she wrote in concealment and sent out by trusty hands, in cantos, that autobiography in which she appealed to posterity, and by which posterity has been convinced. She traced her career from earliest childhood down to the very brink of the grave into which she was looking. Her intellectual, affectional and mental history are all there written with a hand as steady and a mind as serene as though she were at home, with her baby sleeping in its cradle by her side. Here are found history, philosophy, political science, poetry, and ethics as they were received and given out again by one of the most receptive and imparting minds ever possessed by woman. She knew that husband, home, child, and friends were not for her any more, and that very soon she was to see the last of earth from beside the headsman and from the block, and yet she turned from all regret and fear, and summoned the great assize of posterity, "of foreign nations and the next ages," to do her justice. There was no sign of fear. She looked as calmly on what she knew she must soon undergo as the spirit released into never-ending bliss looks back upon the corporeal trammels from which it has just earned its escape.

There are those who believe that a woman can not be great as she was and still be pure. These ghouls of history will to the end of time dig into the graves where such queens lie entombed. This woman has slept serenely for nearly a century. Sweet oblivion has dimmed with denial and forgetfulness the obloquy which hunted her in her last days. Tears such as are shed for vestal martyrs have been shed for her, and for all her faults she has the condonation of universal sorrow. Nothing but the evil magic of sympathetic malice can restore these calumnies, and even then they quickly fade away in the sunlight of her life. Nothing can touch her further. Dismiss them with the exorcism of Carlyle, grown strangely tender and elegiac here. "Breathe not thy poison breath! Evil speech! That soul is taintless; clear as the mirror sea." She was brought to trial. The charge against her was, "That there has existed a horrible conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the French people; that Marie Jeanne Phlipon, wife of Jean Marie Roland has been one of the abettors or accomplices of that conspiracy." This was the formula by which this woman was killed, and it simply meant that the Gironde had existed and that she had sympathized with it.

She was racked with interrogations, and returned to the prison, weeping at the infernal imputations which they cast upon her womanhood. On the day of her final trial she dressed herself in spotless white, and let fall the voluminous masses of her brown, abundant hair. She was asked to betray her husband by disclosing his hiding place. Her answer is full of wifely loyalty and dignity--"Whether I know it or not I neither ought nor will say."

There was absolutely no evidence against her except of her affiliations with the Girondists. The mockery ended by her condemnation to death within twenty-four hours, and this Iphigenia of France went doomed back to her cell. Her return was awaited with dreadful anxiety by her associates in confinement, who hoped against hope for her safe deliverance. As she passed through the massive doors, she smiled, and drew her hand knife-like across her neck, and then there went up a wail from all assembled there, the wail of titled women, of sacred nuns, of magdalens and thieves, a dirge of inconsolable sorrow, of humanity weeping for its best beloved child.

Late in the afternoon of November 8, 1693, the rude cart which was to bear her to the guillotine received her. She was dressed in white; her hair fell like a mantle to her knees. The chilly air and her own courage brought back to her prison-blanched cheek the rosy hues of youth. She spoke words of divine patience to the crowd which surged around her on her way and reviled her. With a few low words she raised the courage of a terror-stricken old man who took with her the same last journey, and made him smile. As the hours wore into twilight, she passed the home of her youth, and perhaps longed to become a little child again and enter there and be at rest. At the foot of the scaffold she asked for pen and paper to bequeath to posterity the thoughts which crowded upon her; they were refused, and thus was one of the books of the sibyls lost. She bowed to the great statue of Liberty near by, exclaiming, "O Liberté! comme on t' a jouée!" and gave her majestic form to the headsman to be bound upon the plank.

The knife fell, and the world darkened upon the death of the queenliest woman who ever lived and loved.--EX-GOVERNOR C.K. DAVIS, of Minnesota.

What though the triumph of thy fond forecasting Lingers till earth is fading from thy sight? Thy part with Him whose arms are everlasting, Is not forsaken in a hopeless night.

Paul was begotten in the death of Stephen; Fruitful through time shall be that precious blood: No morning yet has ever worn to even And missed the glory of its crimson flood.

There is a need of all the blood of martyrs, Forevermore the eloquence of God; And there is need of him who never barters His patience in that desert way the Master trod.

What mean the strange, hard words, "through tribulation?" O Man of sorrows, only Thou canst tell, And such as in Thy life's humiliation, Have oft been with Thee, ay, have known Thee well.

The failures of the world are God's successes, Although their coming be akin to pain; And frowns of Providence are but caresses, Prophetic of the rest sought long in vain.

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XXXVI.

CHEERFUL AND BRAVE.

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON--SIR WALTER RALEIGH--XENOPHON-- CÆSAR--NELSON--HENRY OF NAVARRE--QUEEN ELIZABETH-- SYDNEY SMITH--ROBERT HALL--LATIMER--TOM HOOD.

Baron Muffling relates of the Duke of Wellington, that that great general remained at the Duchess of Richmond's ball till about three o'clock on the morning of the 16th of June, 1815, "showing himself very cheerful." The baron, who is a very good authority on the subject, having previously proved that every plan was laid in the duke's mind, and Quatre Bras and Waterloo fully detailed, we may comprehend the value of the sentence. It was the bold, trusting heart of the hero that made him cheerful. He showed himself cheerful, too, at Waterloo. He was never very jocose; but on that memorable 18th of June he showed a symptom of it. He rode along the line and cheered men by his look and his face, and they too cheered him. But, when the danger was over--when the 21,000 brave men of his own and the Prussian army lay stiffening in death--the duke, who was so cheerful in the midst of his danger, covered his face with his hands and wept. He asked for that friend, and he was slain; for this, and a bullet had pierced his heart. The men who had devoted themselves to death for their leader and their country had been blown to pieces, or pierced with lances, or hacked with sabers, and lay, like Ponsonby covered with thirteen wounds, upon the ground. Well might the duke weep, iron though he was. "There is nothing," he writes, "nothing in the world so dreadful as a battle lost, unless it be such a battle won. Nothing can compensate for the dreadful cruelty, carnage, and misery of the scene, save the reflection on the public good which may arise from it."

Forty years' peace succeeded the great battle. Forty years of prosperity, during which he himself went honored to his tomb, rewarded the constant brave look and tongue which answered his men, when he saw the whole side of a square blown in, with "Hard work, gentlemen! They are pounding away! We must see who can pound the longest." It is not too much to say that the constant cheerfulness of the Duke of Wellington was one great element of success in the greatest battle ever fought, one of the fifteen decisive battles in the world, great in the number engaged, greater in the slaughter, greatest in the results. But all commanders ought to be cheerful. Gloomy looks do not do in the army. A set of filibusters or pirates may wear looks and brows as black as the sticking-plasters boots that their representatives are dressed in at the minor theaters; but a soldier or a sailor should be, and as a rule is, the most cheerful of fellows, doing his duty in the trench or the storm, dying when the bullet comes, but living like a hero the while. Look, for instance, at the whole-hearted cheerfulness of Raleigh, when with his small English ships he cast himself against the navies of Spain; or at Xenophon, conducting back from an inhospitable and hostile country, and through unknown paths, his ten thousand Greeks; or Cæsar, riding up and down the banks of the Rubicon, sad enough belike when alone, but at the head of his men cheerful, joyous, well dressed, rather foppish, in fact, his face shining with good humor as with oil. Again, Nelson, in the worst of dangers, was as cheerful as the day. He had even a rough but quiet humor in him just as he carried his coxswain behind him to bundle the swords of the Spanish and French captains under his arm. He could clap his telescope to his blind eye, and say, "Gentlemen, I can not make out the signal," when the signal was adverse to his wishes, and then go in and win, in spite of recall. Fancy the dry laughs which many an old sea-dog has had over that cheerful incident. How the story lights up the dark page of history! Then there was Henry of Navarre, lion in war, winner of hearts, bravest of the brave, who rode down the ranks at Ivry when Papist and Protestant were face to face, when more than his own life and kingdom were at stake, and all the horrors of religious war were loosened and unbound, ready to ravage poor, unhappy France. That beaming, hopeful countenance won the battle, and is a parallel to the brave looks of Queen Elizabeth when she cheered her Englishmen at Tilbury.

But we are not all soldiers or sailors, although, too, our Christian profession hath adopted the title of soldiers in the battle of life. It is all very well to cite great commanders who, in the presence of danger, excited by hope, with the eyes of twenty thousand men upon them, are cheerful and happy; but what is that to the solitary author, the poor artist, the governess, the milliner, the shoemaker, the factory-girl, they of the thousand persons in profession or trade who are given to murmur, and who think life so hard and gloomy and wretched that they can not go through it with a smile on their faces and despair in their hearts? What are examples and citations to them? "Hecuba!" cries out poor, melancholy, morbid Hamlet, striking on a vein of thought, "what's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" Much.

We all have trials; but it is certain that good temper and cheerfulness will make us bear them more easily than any thing else. "Temper," said one of our bishops, "is nine-tenths of Christianity." We do not live now in the Middle Ages. We can not think that the sect of Flagellants, who whipped themselves till the blood ran into their shoes, and pulled uncommonly long faces, were the best masters of philosophy. "True godliness is cheerful as the day," wrote Cowper, himself melancholy-mad enough; and we are to remember that the precept of the Founder of our faith, that when we fast we are to anoint our countenances and not to seem to fast, enjoins a certain liveliness of face. Sydney Smith, when a poor curate at Foster-le-Clay, a dreary, desolate place, wrote: "I am resolved to like it, and to reconcile myself to it, which is more manly than to fancy myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post of being thrown away, or being desolated, and such like trash." And he acted up to this; said his prayers, made his jokes, did his duty, and, Upon fine mornings, used to draw up the blinds of his parlor, open the window, and "glorify the room," as he called the operation, with sunshine. But all the sunshine without was nothing to the sunshine within the heart. It was that which made him go through life so bravely and so well; it is that, too, which renders his life a lesson to us all.

We must also remember that the career of a poor curate is not the most brilliant in the world. That of an apprentice boy has more fun in it; that of a milliner's girl has more merriment and fewer depressing circumstances. To hear always the same mistrust of Providence, to see poverty, to observe all kinds of trial, to witness death-bed scenes--this is not the most enlivening course of existence, even if a clergyman be a man of mark and of station. But there was one whose station was not honored, nay, even by some despised, and who had sorer trials than Sydney Smith. His name is well known in literature; and his writings and his example still teach us in religion. This was Robert Hall, professor of a somber creed in a somber flat country, as flat and "deadly-lively," as they say, as need be. To add to difficulties and troubles, the minister was plagued with about as painful an illness as falls to the lot of humanity to bear. He had fought with infidelity and doubt; he had refused promotion, because he would do his duty where it had pleased God to place him; next he had to show how well he could bear pain. In all his trials he had been cheerful, forcible, natural, and straightforward. In this deep one he preserved the same character. Forced to throw himself down and writhe upon the floor in his paroxysms of pain, he rose up, livid with exhaustion, and with the sweat of anguish on his brow, without a murmur.