When Louis Philippe fled, Charles R. harangued the people. He would have thrown the red flag of the old republic to the breeze, and have followed it to the world’s end. The French have grown no wiser since Robespierre’s day; and in Robespierre’s day they sat around Plutarch’s Lives, and modeled government upon the anecdotal garrulity of an old gentleman who lived some two thousand years ago. But Charles found that his friends were in the Provisional Government—one of whom he hoped soon to see stealing all power from his associates—so he acquiesced in Lamartine’s well-turned sentences, and consented that the tricolor and a poet should be uppermost for a time. Charles entered the National Assembly, as a member from the department of the Seine, and took his seat with the Mountain; that great party, whose history is more terrible than that of any body of men, either of ancient or of modern days, which has come down to us. “The Mountain!” exclaimed Charles R., at a _conversazione_ which I attended at his rooms; “how often do my thoughts run back to its great leader. Extremely beautiful, extremely touching, too, are the chapters which Michelet devotes to the history of the Purcelle. She, who had been taught neither to read nor to write, but who had learned all her mother knew of sacred things, left her sewing, and her spinning, and went forth to give courage to men; to give a king to her country; to turn back the tide of conquest; to smite victorious armies with ceaseless rout and ruin, urged, sustained, by that certain knowledge of being called, which God gives to all the chiefest instruments of his dispensations—by the certain knowledge, too, of the quick coming of a martyr’s death. There was another, of a sterner sex, appointed unto times more trying, who equally saved France, when three-fifths of France were traitors unto France; who alone, of all the faithful, never for a moment despaired of the Republic; who assumed nothing, claimed nothing, asked for nothing for himself, but all for his country; whose will, of a wonderful energy, scattered the victorious arms, not of one nation, but of combined Europe; who, from afar off, retired, sitting in his narrow chamber over the cabinetmaker’s shop, blasted with the breath of his nostrils the well-concerted plans, the strength of despotism, and delivered over France, his great mother, into the hands of those who came after him, triumphant, uncontaminated by the tread of a single foreign foe. He, too, had the certain knowledge of being called and appointed to a purpose; and the certain knowledge of the quick coming of death; for he often spoke of it as a fit crowning of a great labor. Robespierre a coward! He who spoke daily, as of old the Athenian spoke, at the gage of life! Death was at all times treading hard upon his footsteps; and did he shun it in that last hour when he put aside the proclamation which was to give him the victory? Many have been the martyrs for opinion’s sake.