The account of the imprisonment and death of Louis XVII. had hitherto come down to his people stripped of much of its true character, and clothed with a mistiness that disguised the naked horror of the truth, and flattered the sensitive vanity of the nation into the belief--or at any rate into the plausible hope--that much had been exaggerated, and that the historians of those times had used too strong colors in portraying the sufferings of the son of their murdered king. The _Grande Nation_ had been always grand; she had had her hour of delirium, and run wild in anarchy and chaos while it lasted; but she had never disowned her essential greatness, never forfeited her humanity, the grandeur of her mission as the eldest daughter of the church of Christ, and the apostle of civilization among the peoples. The demon in man’s shape, called Simon the Cordwainer, had disgraced his manhood by torturing a feeble, inoffensive child committed to his mercy, but he alone was responsible. The governing powers of the time were in total ignorance of his proceedings; France had no share in the blame or the infamy. The sensational legend of the Temple was bad enough, but at its worst no one was responsible but Simon, a besotted shoemaker. It was even hinted that the Dauphin had been rescued, and had not died in the Tower at all, and many tender-hearted Frenchmen clung long and tenaciously to this fiction. But at the appointed time one man, at the bidding of the great Secret-Teller, stood forth and tore away the veil, and discovered to all the world the things that had been done, not by Simon the Cordwainer, but by the _Grande Nation_ in his person. M. de Beauchesne[16] was that man, and nobly, because faithfully and inexorably, he fulfilled his mission. It was a fearful message that he had to deliver, and there is no doubt but that his work--the result of twenty years’ persevering research and study--moved the hearts of his countrymen as no book had ever before moved them. It made an end once and for ever of garbled narratives, and comforting fables, and bade the guilty nation look upon the deeds she had done, and atone for them with God’s help as best she might. In reading the records of those mad times one ceases to wonder at recent events. They give the key to all subsequent crimes and wanderings. A nation that deliberately, in cold, premeditated hate and full wakefulness of reason, decrees by law in open court that God does not exist, and forthwith abolishes him by act of parliament--a nation that does this commits itself to the consequences. France did this in the National Convention of 1793, and why should she not pay the penalty?