In her despair, Madame Gosner thought nothing of the great moral effect her action might produce. She had for years been urged forward by one grand, womanly motive—the freedom of her husband. If this object had sometimes led her into strange positions, great love had always sanctified them. She had endured poverty, humiliation, sickness, with the strength of a martyr, and in all things had protected the delicacy of her child. Even in the depths of her sorrow she had found time to educate this girl, and fill her mind with all the refinements which make womanhood beautiful. But now, in the madness of her despair, she forgot everything but her wrongs, and the agony of a slain hope. What was that miserable shadow of a home to her? What was there on the broad earth but sorrow and desolation for a woman so bereaved, and so cruelly dealt by? In her anguish she felt a yearning sympathy for thousands and thousands of women, who haunted the market places and streets of Paris, with an eternal craving for bread written on their half-famished faces; for the earth, as well as the rulers of the earth, had, for two successive years, been cruel to the poor. The sufferings of these people became a part of her own wrongs. In the mighty thirst of her revenge, she was ready to embrace the whole universe of suffering. Was she insane? Had one idea preyed so heavily on her mind that it swept all other thoughts before it? Be this as it may, from the hour that terrible deception was made known to Madame Gosner, the woman was lost in the patriot. In gaining freedom for her husband, she took upon herself the gigantic task of giving liberty to France. This spirit animated her whole being; it inflamed her speeches, it aroused her in the dead of night, and filled her dreams with burning pictures of liberty. She had but two possessions left—her own talents and her daughter. In the depths of her soul she devoted both to her country. All hopes of individual happiness became a thing of the past to her. With Monsieur Jacques the ideas of liberty, as they were given forth to the people, like an inspiration from the tongue and pen of Mirabeau, had consolidated themselves into a passion; but, like Mirabeau, he still clung to the monarchy, and hoped to liberalize France, by making its king the enemy of his own power. Brought up and educated as he had been, day by day, with his foster-brother, sharing the same lessons, caressed by the same motherly hand, he could not, all at once, yield up the traditions of a superior race to which, by implication and experience he almost belonged. It was in vain that he took upon himself the habits of the people, that he lived in a garret, and gave up the income of a little property which he had inherited from his own parents, to swell the extravagance of his foster-brother. A neglected toilet, unwashed hands, and coarse clothing, were insufficient to brutalize this man into one of the monsters that baptized themselves patriots.