There are few printed things one meets with of such tragic, almost ghastly significance, as those bald pages of the _Bulletin du Tribunal Revolutionnaire_, which bear title, "Trial of the Widow Capet." Dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse, like the pale kingdoms of Dis! Plutonic judges, Plutonic Tinville; encircled nine times with Styx and Lethe, with Fire-Phlegethon and Cocytus, named of Lamentation! The very witnesses summoned are like ghosts; exculpatory, inculpatory, they themselves are all hovering over death and doom; they are known in our imagination as the prey of the guillotine. Tall _ci-devant_ Count d'Estaing, anxious to show himself patriot, cannot escape; nor Bailly, who, when asked if he knows the accused, answers with a reverent inclination towards her, "Ah, yes, I know Madame." Ex-patriots are here, sharply dealt with as Procureur Manuel; ex-ministers, shorn of their splendour. We have cold aristocratic impassivity, faithful to itself even in Tartarus; rabid stupidity of patriot corporals, patriot washerwomen, who have much to say of plots, treasons, August tenth, old insurrection of women. For all now has become a crime in her who has lost. Marie Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they say, as that hideous indictment was reading, continued calm. "She was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one plays on the piano." You discern not without interest across that dim Revolutionary Bulletin itself, how she bears herself queen-like. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. "You persist, then, in denial?" "My plan is not denial; it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that." Scandalous Hebert has borne his testimony as to many things; as to one thing concerning Marie Antoinette and her little son, wherewith human speech had better not further be soiled. She has answered Hebert; a juryman begs to observe that she has not answered to this. "I have not answered," she exclaims with noble emotion, "because nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers that are here." Robespierre, when he heard of it, broke out into something almost like swearing at the brutish blockheadism of this Hebert, on whose foul head his foul lie has recoiled. At four o'clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two nights of interrogating, jury charging, and other darkening of counsel, the result comes out--sentence of death. "Have you anything to say?" The accused shook her head, without speech. Night's candles are burning out; and with her, too, Time is finishing, and it will be eternity and day. This hall of Tinville's is dark, ill-lighted, except where she stands. Silently she withdraws from it to die.