A large number of the pictures which appeared during the last months of the king's life have been preserved. At an earlier stage of the movement both friends and foes of the monarchy used the satiric pencil, but now there was none to take the side of this bewildered family, and the pictures aimed at them were hard and pitiless. The reader has but to turn to the specimen here given, which was called forth by the transfer of the royal family from their home in the Tuileries to their prison in the Temple, to comprehend the spirit of those productions. In others we find the king represented as a blind man groping his way; as a baby; as an idiot who breaks his playthings and throws away his crown and sceptre. The queen excited a deeper feeling. The Parisians of 1792 appear to have had for that most unhappy of women only feelings of diabolical hate. She called forth all the tiger which, according to Voltaire, is an ingredient in the French character. The caricaturists liked to invest her with the qualities and the form of a tigress, living in a monstrous alliance with a king-ram, and becoming the mother of monsters. The foolish tale of her saying that she would quench her thirst with the blood of Frenchmen was treated by the draughtsmen of the day as though it were an unquestionable fact. Never was a woman so hated as she was by infuriate Paris in 1792. Never was womanhood so outraged as in some of the caricatures of that period. Nothing relating to her had any kind of sacredness. Her ancestors, her country, her mother, her children, her love for her children, her attachment to her husband, were all exhibited in the most odious light as so many additional crimes against liberty. Need it be said that her person was not spared? The single talent in which the French excel all the rest of the human family is that of subtly insinuating indecency by pen and pencil. But they did not employ this talent in the treatment of Marie Antoinette when she was about to redeem a frivolous life by a dignified death. With hideous indecency they presented her to the scorn of the public, as African savages might exhibit the favorite wife of a hostile chief when they had brought her to their stinking village a captive, bound, naked, and defiled. And so passed away forever from the minds of men the sense of the divinity that once had hedged in a king. But so congenial to minds immature or unformed is the idea of hereditary chieftainship that to this day in Europe the semblance of a king seems the easiest resource against anarchy. Yet kings were put upon their good behavior, to hold their places until majorities learn to control their propensities and use their minds. [Illustration: Aristocrat and Democrat. (Paris, 1793.) _Aristocrat._ "Take care of your cap." _Democrat._ "Look out for your queue."] CHAPTER XV. CARICATURES OF WOMEN AND MATRIMONY.