The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
Yielding to reasons at least as forcible as those which were so
delicately urged in the compliment on the new year, the king of France
will probably endeavor to forget these events and that compliment. But
History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her
awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not
forget either those events, or the era of this liberal refinement in the
intercourse of mankind. History will record, that, on the morning of the
sixth of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of
confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged
security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite,
and troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first
startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her
to save herself by flight,--that this was the last proof of fidelity he
could give,--that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was
cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his
blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred
strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted
woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown
to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and
husband not secure of his own life for a moment.
This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant
children, (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and
generous people,) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most
splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood,
polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated
carcasses. Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom.
Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous
slaughter which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who
composed the king's body-guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade
of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged to the
block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were
stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who
followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells,
and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and
all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused
shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by
drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a
journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were, under a
guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them
through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris,
now converted into a Bastile for kings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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