[17] The Carmagnole was originally a Provençal dance tune, which was frequently adapted to songs of various import. During the Revolution, so-called patriotic words were set to it, and it was sung, like the “Marseillaise,” to inspire popular wrath against royalty. [18]Jean Paul Marat, the French revolutionist, was born in Switzerland in 1744. He was both physician and scientist in his earlier years, but at the outbreak of the Revolution took a prominent part in the agitation for a republic, and incited the people to violence. In 1792 he was elected to the National Convention, and in 1793 was tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal as an ultra-revolutionist, but was acquitted. July 13, 1793, he was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, who was guillotined for the murder four days later. [19]Saumur is a town in the department of Maine-et-Loire, on the Loire River. It was here that the Vendeans, who were partisans of the royal rising against the Revolution and the Republic, won a victory over the Republican Army June 9, 1793, and took the town. [20]Marie Antoinette died upon the scaffold as bravely as the King had done. Her trial was a mock one, for her execution had been decided upon before she was tried. She was never liked by the French people, and all sorts of charges had been made against her, many of them untrue. She had inherited her ideas of royalty and absolution from her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, and never showed any interest in the lower classes. Her biographer in the Encyclopædia Britannica says: “In the Marie Antoinette who suffered on the guillotine we pity, not the pleasure-loving Queen; not the widow who had kept her husband against his will in the wrong course; not the woman who throughout her married life did not scruple to show her contempt for her slow and heavy but good-natured and loving King, but the little princess, sacrificed to state policy and cast uneducated and without a helper into the frivolous court of France, not to be loved but to be suspected by all around her and eventually to be hated by the whole people of France.” [21]Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most prominent among the revolutionists, was the leader of the extreme Left in the Constituent Assembly, and a member of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793. He was also identified with the Reign of Terror, but was finally stripped of all his power, and was guillotined July 28, 1794. [22]The Dauphin died in the afternoon of June 8, 1795. LIFE STORIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE _BIOGRAPHICAL ROMANCES TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY_ GEORGE P. UPTON _A new, interesting, and very useful series that will be found especially suitable for school libraries and for supplementary reading_