of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted
woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown
to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and
husband not secure of his own life for a moment.

This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant
children, (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and
generous people,) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most
splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood,
polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated
carcasses. Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom.
Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous
slaughter which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who
composed the king's body-guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade
of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged to the
block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were
stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who
followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells,
and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and
all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused
shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by
drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a
journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were, under a
guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them
through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris,
now converted into a Bastile for kings.

Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars, to be commemorated with
grateful thanksgiving, to be offered to the Divine Humanity with fervent
prayer and enthusiastic ejaculation?--These Theban and Thracian orgies,
acted in France, and applauded only in the Old Jewry, I assure you,
kindle prophetic enthusiasm in the minds but of very few people in this
kingdom: although a saint and apostle, who may have revelations of his
own, and who has so completely vanquished all the mean superstitions of
the heart, may incline to think it pious and decorous to compare it
with the entrance into the world of the Prince of Peace, proclaimed in
an holy temple by a venerable sage, and not long before not worse
announced by the voice of angels to the quiet innocence of shepherds