"You declare, sir, that it would need a people of poets to understand my contradictions of 'extinct kingdoms and young republics:' is it likely that you too have not celebrated liberty and yet found some magnificent words for the tyrants who oppressed it? You quote the Du Barrys, the Montespans, the Fontanges, the La Vallières: you recall royal weaknesses; but did those weaknesses cost France what the debauches of Danton and Camille Desmoulins cost her? The morals of those plebeian Catalines were reflected even in their speech: they borrowed their metaphors from the piggeries of infamous persons and prostitutes. Did the frailties of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. send the fathers and husbands to the gallows, after dishonouring the daughters and wives? Did his blood-baths do more to render chaste a revolutionary's lewdness than did her milk-baths to render virginal a Poppæa's pollution? If Robespierre's hucksters had retailed to the people of Paris the blood from Danton's bathing-tub, as Nero's slaves sold to the inhabitants of Rome the milk from his courtesan's _thermæ_, do you think that any virtue would have been found in the rinsings of the obscene headsmen of the Terror? "The swiftness and the height of the flight of your muse have deceived you, sir: the sun, which laughs at all misery, must have struck the garments of a widow; they must have seemed 'gilded' to you: I have seen those garments, they were of mourning; they knew nothing of pleasure; the child, in the entrails which bore him, was rocked only to the sound of tears; if he had 'danced nine months in his mother's womb,' as you say, he would then have known joy only before being born, between conception and delivery, between the assassination and the proscription! 'The pallor of fearsome omen' which you remarked on Henry's face is the result of his father's blood-letting, and not of a ball of two hundred and seventy nights. The old curse was kept up for the daughter of Henry IV.: _In dolore paries filios._ I know none save the Goddess of Reason whose confinements, hastened by adultery, took place amid the dances of Death. From her public flanks fell unclean reptiles which, at that very instant, began to jig in the ring with the knitting-women around the scaffold, to the sound of the rise and fall of the knife, the refrain of that devils' dance.