souvenirs of Plutarch and the parodies of Jean-Jacques, the noisy crowd of flatterers who are the courtiers of demagogues as they would have been the courtiers of kings, these adulators who are going to change into executioners,--all are vanity! Poor {72} woman, whose power will be so ephemeral, why do you make yourself a persecutor? You will so soon be persecuted. Why labor so relentlessly to shake the foundations of a throne that will bury you beneath its ruins? {73} VII. MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ROLAND. Two women find themselves confronted across the chessboard and about to move the pieces in a terrible game in which each stakes her head, and each is foredoomed to lose. One is the woman who represents the old régime--the daughter of the German Cæsars, the Queen of France and Navarre; the other stands for the new régime, the Parisian middle classes--the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfèvres. They are nearly the same age. Madame Roland was born March 18, 1754; and Marie Antoinette, November 2, 1755. Both are beautiful, and both are conscious of their charm. Each exercises a sort of domination over all who approach her. In 1792, when Roland enters the ministry, Marie Antoinette is no longer thinking of coquetry, luxury, or dress. The heroine of the Gallery of the Mirrors, the crowned shepherdess of the Trianon, the queen of elegance, pleasure, and fashion is not recognizable in her. The time for splendors is over, like the time for pastorals. No more festivals, no more distractions, no more theatres. Incessant anxieties and unremitting labor; writing throughout the day and reading, {74} meditating, and praying throughout the night, are now the unfortunate sovereign's whole existence. She hardly sleeps. Her eyes are reddened by tears. A single night, that of the arrest on the journey to Varennes, had sufficed to whiten her hair. She wears mourning for her brother, the Emperor Leopold, and for her ally, the King of Sweden, Gustavus III., and one might say that she is also wearing it for the French monarchy. All trace of frivolity has disappeared. The severe and majestic countenance of the woman who suffers so cruelly as queen, spouse, and mother, is sanctified by the double poetry of religion and sorrow.