The fate of Antoinette darkened rapidly. With the king, she fled to Varennes--with him was brought back to Paris. Her courage did not fail in the scene of the Legislative Assembly, before which body she was present with her husband, heard his deposition pronounced, and then went into the Temple, where he was imprisoned. Here, where the light of heaven faintly fell through grated windows, surrounded by her family, she appeared to feel entire resignation to the will of Him on whom the happiness of the humblest individual depends. When she heard the condemnation of the king from the lips of the royal victim, she had the firmness to congratulate him on the speedy delivery from trouble that awaited him. Her eternal separation from her son did not shake her firmness, and, with a heart apparently unbroken, she was consigned to the loathsome depths of a dungeon, August 5th, 1793. The accusations brought against the unhappy queen, on her trial, were all unfounded, and merely advanced because her enemies had still respect enough for justice to mimic its forms in their guilty court. She was charged with having squandered the public money, and with leaguing in secret with the common enemies of France. The clearness of her innocence, the falsehood and frivolity of the witnesses, the eloquence of the defenders, and her own noble bearing, were of no avail: Marie Antoinette was doomed to die upon the scaffold. The expression of her countenance, as she passed to the place of execution, awed the bloodthirsty populace; but the once matchless beauty of that noble countenance was gone forever. One unacquainted with the ravages of grief could not believe that the haggard and forsaken being whom they led to sacrifice, was the same young queen, who, a short time before, held in thrall the chivalry of France, by her exquisite loveliness, her winning grace, and sportive gayety. Antoinette cast back a long, last look at the Tuileries--a look which told of sorrowful remembrance and of agonizing emotion; then, with an air of dignified resignation, she ascended the scaffold. "My God," cried she, as she kneeled on that fatal platform, "enlighten and affect my executioner! Adieu, my children, my beloved ones: I am going to your father!" Thus she perished, in her thirty-eighth year, October 16th, 1793. In the gayety of youth and the sunshine of prosperity, Marie Antoinette had exhibited some foibles amid many virtues. In the beginning of her trials, she displayed, as well as those around her, serious mistakes of judgment; but in the dark hour of adversity, she exhibited a spectacle of truth, firmness, and dignity, hardly less than sublime. When confined with her family in the prison of the Temple, with only a glimmering ray of light stealing through the iron bars, she displayed the utmost calmness, cheered all around with her counsel and example, and taught them to disregard privation, sickness, and suffering.