The Mountain has triumphed. The Jacobins, infuriated by the taste of a king's blood, will next devour their fellow-members. The Girondins, the heart and brains of France, are expelled from the convention, dragged to prison and to the guillotine. Paine's plea for mercy can not be forgiven. He is imprisoned; sentence of death is finally pronounced against him; the hour for his execution, with that of his fellow-prisoners, is set. Fortuitously he escapes. In summoning the victims for execution he is overlooked. Soon after, and before the mistake is discovered, the bloody Robespierre is overthrown, and his own neck receives the blow he meant for Paine. The fall of Robespierre stems the crimson torrent and, in time, secures for Paine his freedom. His imprisonment has lasted nearly a year, a year never to be forgotten, a year of chaos, from which is to arise a fairer and a better France. Let us contemplate, for a moment, this bloody and protracted drama. Let us, in imagination, visit this death-stricken Paris. Buildings--once palaces--have been transformed into prisons. Thousands are crowded within their walls; beings of both sexes, and of every age and rank; grayhaired men who look with stolid indifference upon the scenes around them; youth, pale with fear; heroic types of manhood pacing to and fro with all the bearing of conquerors; frail women, whose swollen eyes, those tear-stained windows of the soul, faintly reveal the heart's fierce agony within! The scene is changed. All is bustle and confusion. A morbid and excited crowd is gathering; the death tumbrils go rumbling by toward the Place de la Revolution; the groans of men, the shrieks of women, rend the air and throw a shade of sadness over all deeper than midnight's gloom. Again the scene shifts. The bustle is over now; the crowd has dispersed; those shrieks and groans are hushed. But that huge pile of headless trunks; the headsman's sack; those pools of blood; that blood-stained instrument, to whose edge still cling the straggling hairs of its victims, the golden threads of youth mingled with the silver threads of age, these remain--grim fragments of the feast where this French Saturn made his last repast. Day after day this carnival of death goes on. Danton, Brissot, and many more of the best men of France are butchered; Roland and Condorcet die by their own hands; Talleyrand is a refugee in America, and Lafayette pines in the dungeon vaults of Austria. Many noble women, too, are sacrificed. Marie Antoinette follows her Louis to the scaffold. In the Conciergerie, companions for a time, are held captive two of the purest and noblest of women,--the lovely and amiable Josephine Beauhamais, destined to become Napoleon's queen, and the beautiful and gifted Madame Roland, whose innocent blood must wet the cruel knife of the guillotine.