he guillotine,
he was arrested by the Jacobins and National Guards, who had stormed
the gates and penetrated into the building, and the attempt to blow out
his brains with his pistol miscarried. Bleeding, his jaw shattered by
the bullet, he was dragged before Fouquier-Tainville to receive his
sentence, and to be conducted thence to the scaffold. In order that the
proceeding should be attended with all formalities, he was, however,
first conducted to the Tuileries, where the Committee of Public Safety
was then sitting in the chamber of Queen Marie Antoinette. Into the
bedchamber of the queen whom Robespierre had brought to the scaffold,
the bleeding, half-lifeless dictator was now dragged. Like a bundle of
rags he was contemptuously thrown on the large table that stood in the
middle of the room. But yesterday Robespierre had been enthroned at this
table as almighty ruler over the lives and possessions of all Frenchmen;
but yesterday he had here issued his decrees and signed the
death-sentences, that lay on the table, unexecuted. These papers were
now the only salve the ghastly, groaning man could apply to the wound in
his face, from which blood poured in streams. The death-sentences signed
by himself now drank his own blood, and he had nothing but a rag of a
tricolor, thrown him by a compassionate _sans-culotte_, with which to
bind up the great, gaping wound on his head. As he sat there in the
midst of the blood-saturated papers, bleeding, groaning, and
complaining, an old National Guard, with outstretched arms, pointing to
this ghastly object, cried: "Yes, Robespierre was right. There is a
Supreme Being!"

This period of blood and terror was now over; Robespierre was dead;
Theroigne de Mericourt was no longer the Goddess of Reason, and
Mademoiselle Maillard no longer Goddess of Liberty and Virtue. Women had
given up representing divinities, and desired to be themselves again,
and to rebuild in the drawing-rooms of the capital, by means of their
intellect and grace, the throne which had gone down in the revolution.

Madame Tallien, Madame Recamier, and Madame de Stael, reorganized
society, and all were anxious to obtain admission to their parlors. To
be sure, these entertainments and reunions still wore a sufficiently
strange and fantastic appearance. Fashion, which had so long been
compelled to give way to the _carmagnole_ and red cap, endeavored to
avenge its long banishment by all manner of caprices and humors, and i