g and invader-defying Republic.

Of all the personages of that unhappy time, the locksmithing King
Louis XVI least understood what was going on about him.

A true Bourbon with an ancestry of nearly a thousand years' possession
of the French throne, he never learned anything and never forgot
anything. He played at being a limited monarch but his sympathies were
naturally with the riffled aristocrats--the nobility whose privileges
had been taken away, their estates commandeered, their chateaux fired
or sacked, and themselves obliged to flee for their lives to the
protection of the foreigner.

Not comprehending the nature of the Storm that wiped out old tyranny,
Louis dangerously rode the Storm, he could not guide it. His lack of
understanding is sadly shown in the closing scene at Versailles when
they brought him news of the people's coming.

"Mais, c'est une revolte. Why, that is a revolt!" exclaimed the
bewildered monarch.

"No, Sire," replied the Minister gravely, "'tis not a revolt. It is a
revolution!"

Within a few hours the yelling maenads and bold satyrs of the
sansculottes possessed the gorgeous Salon de la Paix, whilst the King
and his family were on their way to Paris....

Then followed many weary months of royalist intrigue, plot and counter
plot, secret dickers with foreign Powers, attempts at escape, fresh
indignities by the mob, until at last Royalty is suspended from its
function, becomes the prisoner instead of the ruler. Turned out of the
Tuileries, Louis and Marie Antoinette are no longer King and
Queen--henceforth Citizen and Citizeness Capet. At the end of dreadful
imprisonments, looms for the hapless pair the dread Scaffold....

A real Republic teeters for a short period on the crest of the
Revolutionary wave. Men are mad with the joy over the new thought of
universal brotherhood. Little do Danton and the other Utopians realize
that the Pageant of Brotherhood is but the prelude of a new
Despotism.

For a dark ring of foes--spurred to invasion by the King's
misfortunes--surrounds France on every side. Within, the cry
re-echoes: "The traitors to the prisons!" and all the aristocrats as
yet at large are hunted down and put in durance.

As Minister of Justice, Danton, the idol of the people, acts quickly
to subdue aristocracy, and ceaselessly organizes--organizes--organizes
the raw republican levies into troops fit to resist the advancing
Prussians, Austrians and Savoyards.

Lashed to unco