hich the Jacobins rode and directed
until it dashed even them upon the rocks. Squalor came forth and
consorted with cleanliness; vice crept from its dens and sat down by the
side of purity in high places; atheism took its stand at the altar, and
ministered with the priest.

This assembly adjourned, and the Rolands returned, for a short time, to
Platiere. By this time it was evident that the monarchy could not stand
against the attacks of both its enemies; the king was compelled to
yield; he threw himself into the arms of the Girondists, as his least
obnoxious foes. He formed a new cabinet, and to Roland was given the
ministry of the interior. It was a very great office. Its incumbent had
administrative charge of all the internal affairs of France. The
engraver's daughter was now the mistress of a palace. From the lowly
room where she had read Plutarch until her mind was made grand with
ideas of patriotic glory, until she loved her country as once she loved
her God, she had gone by no base degrees to an eminence where her
beloved France, with all its hopes and woes and needs and resources, lay
like a map beneath her--a map for her and hers to change.

By this time the titled refugees had brought the Prussian armies to the
frontier; a majority of the clergy had identified themselves with the
reaction, were breaking down the revolution among the people, and were
producing a reversionary tendency to absolutism. The king was
vacillating and timid, but the queen had all the spirit and courage of
her mother, Maria Theresa. It is very evident from Madame Roland's
memoirs and letters, that these two women felt that they were in actual
collision. It is a strange contrast; the sceptered wife, looking from
her high places with longing and regret over centuries of hereditary
succession, divine right and unquestioned prerogative, calling on her
house of Hapsburg for aid, appealing to the kings of the earth for
assistance in moving back the irreversible march of destiny:--from
another palace the daughter of the people looking not back, but forward,
speaking of kings and monarchies as gone, or soon to go, into tables of
chronology, listening to what the ancient centuries speak from Grecian
and Roman tombs, summoning old philosophies to attest the inalienable
rights of man, looking beyond the mobs of kings and lords to the great
nation-forming people, upon which these float and pass away like the
shadows of purple Summer clouds; and st