What a striking lesson for those who play with anarchical passions and end by falling themselves into the snares they have laid for others! Nothing is more deserving of study than this retaliatory punishment which is found, one may say, on every page of revolutionary histories. The hour was coming when the Girondins and their heroine would repent of the means they had employed to overset the throne. This was when the same means were employed against them, when they recognized their own weapons in the wounds they received. Then, when they had no more interest in keeping silence, they sought to escape a complicity that gained them nothing. Instead of the luminous heights which in their golden dreams they had aspired to gain, they fell, crushed and overwhelmed, into a dismal gulf, full of tears and blood. How bitter then were their recriminations against men and things! It was only to virtue that the dying Brutus said: "Thou art but a name." The Girondins said it also to glory, to country, and to liberty. Those among them who did not succeed in fleeing, disavowed, denounced, and insulted each other before the revolutionary tribunal. At the {380} Conciergerie they intoned the Marseillaise, but parodying the demagogic chant in this wise:-- Contre nous de la tyrannie[1] Le _couteau_ sanglant est levé. Read the Memoirs of Louvet, Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, and Madame Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of deceived ambition can go. They are paroxysms of rage, howls of anger, shrieks of despair. Consider the difference between philosophy and religion! The philosophers curse, and the Christian pardons. Yes, as Edgar Quinet has said, "Louis XVI. alone speaks of forgiveness on that scaffold to which the others were to bring thoughts of vengeance and despair. And by that he seems still to reign over those who were to follow him in death with the passions and the furies of earth." Louis XVI. will be magnanimous and calm. A celestial sweetness will overspread his royal countenance. An infernal rage will distort the heart and the features of the Girondins. What pains, what tortures, in their death-struggle! Earth fails them, and they do not look to heaven. What accents of disgust and hatred when they speak of their former accomplices, now become their executioners! "Great God!" Buzot will say, "if it is only by such men and such infamous means that republics {381} can arise and be consolidated, there is no government more frightful on this earth nor more fatal to human happiness." He will address these insults, worthy of the imprecations of Camillus, to the city of Paris: "I say truly, that France can expect neither liberty nor happiness except from the irreparable destruction of that capital."