and under his official signature, to speak to
the people of Paris in these terms: 'I admired the 10th of August; I
shuddered at the consequences of the 2nd of September' (at the
consequences of the horrors that day perpetrated, as M. Edmond Bire very
aptly points out, not at all at the horrors themselves); 'I well
understood what must come of the long-deceived patience and of the
justice of the people. I did not inconsiderately blame a first terrible
movement, but I thought that it was well to prevent its being kept up,
and those who sought to perpetuate it were deceived by their
imagination!'

This monstrous language was used by Roland in a placard published on the
walls of Paris on September 13. The massacres had not then really
ceased, and the 'first terrible movement' seemed likely to be followed
by a second not less 'terrible,' which might make things dangerous, not
for the prisoners huddled under lock and key only, but for certain
members of the Legislative Assembly, the Girondists themselves!

Is it conceivable that now, after a hundred years, rational beings
should look back with any feelings but those of contempt and horror upon
these 'patriots' of 1789? Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' was
simply the soul of a conspiracy of ambitious criminals masquerading in
the guise of philanthropists and philosophers. There is something
biblical in the dramatic completeness of the chastisement which overtook
this unhappy woman. 'They that take the sword shall perish by the
sword.'

The murder of the king, which Madame Roland did so much to compass, led
not indirectly to the ruin of her own most trusted political friends and
associates. The murder of the queen, for which she had longed and
laboured, was brought to pass, on October 16, 1793, by men who had then
made up their minds to send herself to the scaffold, and who sent her to
it, three weeks afterwards, on November 8, 1793. In the ridiculous
revolutionary calendar of the epoch, this date stood as the 18th
Brumaire; Year II. It was celebrated six years afterwards on the 18th
Brumaire of the year VIII. of the Republic, by the advent to supreme
authority of the Corsican soldier who was to found a despotic empire
upon the results of that 'universal war' into which France had been
insanely driven by 'the soul of the Gironde.' A mere coincidence, of
course! It was a mere coincidence, too, that the Girondist,
Dufriche-Valaze, who, at the trial of Louis XVI., esp