Night fell before the procession reached the temple dedicated to the remains of great men, and here Voltaire was enthroned, for he was King of France in that hour; and the weak, vacillating, and kindly Louis XVI, away there in the Tuileries, was crownless, awaiting to pay in his person—he the least odious of his race—for the unceasing crimes and cruelties of his forefathers. CHAPTER XLVIII. THE THREAT IS LOUDER. Throughout August, affairs were tending more and more to dangerous threats. The National Assembly were ostensibly framing a new constitution; but the delegates proceeded very slowly, except in the matter of contradiction, at which they were very brisk. The King’s brothers became still further estranged from him; while the efforts made beyond the frontier, tending to liberate the royal family from the state of imprisonment in which they lived, only tended to hasten the growing belief of the people that by the death of the King, alone could the nation hope to destroy the chances and the plans of those Royalists who had escaped from France, and were blindly endeavoring to serve their own interests by inducing foreign Courts to declare war against France, and march upon Paris. Throughout this period the King gave little expression of opinion, worked and read incessantly, and bore the threatening aspect of affairs about him and his family with great patience. He was an estimable man, honest to a degree, but stupid, hopelessly prejudiced, and apparently without any capability of experiencing tenderness or sorrow. It was now that Roland, the husband of the celebrated Madame Roland, rose to eminence. Nothing in himself, he became notorious through his wife—one of the most beautiful, accomplished, and brilliant, as one of the most unfortunate, the world has yet seen. Her husband was much older than herself—cold, deadly, impassive; but, on the other hand, his steady principles were never for one moment shaken. She was a republican, heart and soul; and when the people, towards the close of the year 1791, began to believe that the differences between the King and the nation would be amicably settled, she never swerved one moment in maintaining that a republic, and only a republic, could save France from invasion.