favorable to serious thought. My imagination
slumbered, I reflected coldly, and I hardly felt at all; suddenly the
color of these violets and their delicate perfume struck my senses; it
was an awakening to life.... A rosy tinge suffused the horizon of the
day." Would not this cry of Madame Roland in her captivity suit Marie
Antoinette as well? "Ah! when shall I breathe pure air and those soft
exhalations so agreeable to my heart?" And might not the daughter of
the great Maria Theresa have cried, like the daughter of Philipon the
engraver? "Adieu! my child, my husband, my friends. Adieu! sun whose
brilliant rays brought serenity to my soul, as if they were recalling
it to the skies. Adieu! ye solitary fields which have so often moved
me."

What must not these two keenly sensitive women have had to suffer at
the epoch when France became a hell? They have each believed in the
amelioration of the human species and the return of the golden age to
earth, and what will their awakening be, after such alluring dreams?
Men will be as unjust, as wicked, as cruel to the republican as to the
queen. {84} She, too, will be drenched with calumnies and outrages.
They will insult her also in the most cowardly and ferocious manner.
Under the very windows of her dungeon she will hear the hawkers crying:
"Great visit of Pere Duchesne to Citizeness Roland, in the Abbey
prison, for the purpose of pumping her." The ignoble journalist will
call her "old sack of the counter-revolution." He will say to her with
his habitual oaths: "Weep for your crimes, old fright, before you
expiate them on the scaffold!" The wife of Louis XVI. and the wife of
Roland will die within twenty-three days of each other: one on October
16, the other on November 8, 1793. They will start from the same
prison of the Conciergerie, to be led to the same Place Louis XV., to
have their heads cut off by the blade of the same guillotine. The
commoner who had been so jealous of the Queen, can no longer complain.
If the lives of the two women have been different, they will at least
have the same death; and the doer of the noble deeds of the regime of
equality, the headsman, will make no distinction between the two
victims, between the veritable sovereign, the Queen of France and
Navarre, and the sovereign of a day, whom Pere Duchesne, as insolent to
one as to the other, will no longer speak of except under the sobriquet
of Queen Coco.

{85}

VIII.

MAD