was the insane extravagance of Louis XIV.’s reign and the official depravity of the succeeding one that sowed the harvest that was to be reaped in fire by the innocent victims of a corruption which for a whole century had been seething as in the caldron of the Prophet’s vision, till it boiled over in the mad frenzy of the Revolution, and swallowed up not only the monarch, but the soul and reason of France, in a deluge of exasperated hate and suicidal revenge. Louis Seize, the martyred king who was to expiate the follies and crimes of his predecessors, next passes before us along the galleries of Versailles. There is an interval of peace, a short halcyon time of pastorals and idyls, we see Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess in Arcadia, we hear Trianon ringing with the music of her light‐hearted laughter, we see her choosing a friend,(74) and braving the jealous anger that makes a crime of her friendship though it be wise, and rebukes her mirth though it be innocent; but the queen turns a deaf ear to all warning sounds and shuts her eyes to the gathering clouds. Imprudent Marie Antoinette! Ill‐adapted wife of timid, hesitating, magnanimous Louis Seize, the Bourbon of whom it was written with truth: “Louis ne sut qu’aimer et pardonner, S’il avait su punir, il aurait su regner.”(75) He loved and forgave to the end, but he never learned to punish. Warnings were not wanting, but he would not heed them. See him standing in the embrasure of the window of that _cabinet du roi_ whence Louis Quatorze ruled the kings and peoples of Europe; a new power has arisen; it is the people’s turn to rule the king, his brow is clouded, his lip trembles, not with fear—that base emotion never stirred the soul of Louis Seize—but with anguish, perplexity, doubts in himself that amounted to despair. He listens to the murmurs of the crowd down below; and to De Brézé, who repeats, in tremulous accents, Mirabeau’s message of tremendous import: “Go tell the king that the will of the people has brought us here, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall drive us hence!” That force he knew full well would never be appealed to; it was not the people who should be driven hence, it was they who would drive the king. Presently we see the ponderous state coach jolting slowly down the Avenue de Paris, the first stage of the royal martyrs towards the guillotine; the mob, in a frenzy of drunken triumph, jostled it from side to side, pressing rudely through the windows to stare at their victims, and insulting them by thrusting the red cap into their faces, and shouting as they go: “The baker and the bakeress! now we have caught them, and the people shall have bread!” This journey dates a new era in the annals of Versailles, it is the death‐knell of the pleasant days of royalty; there are to be no more _fêtes pastorales_ at Trianon, no more merry children of France careering over the flowery terraces, making the sombre alleys bright and the gay