ecially gratified
the personal malignity of Madame Roland by the insolence with which he
treated the royal captive, should have tried to save his own head when
he and his comrades at last were writhing in the iron grip of
Robespierre, by eagerly denouncing his friend and associate, Valady, as
the real author of a particularly virulent placard intended by the
Girondists to turn the fury of the Parisian mob against the Jacobins!
Seeing that he had disgraced himself to no purpose, the wretched
creature, who had contrived to conceal a dagger about his person, drew
it out when the merciless prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, rising in his
place, demanded, on October 29, 1793, that all the Girondists then on
trial, having been found guilty by the jury--though no plea had been
heard in their defence, and the judge had not summed up--should be
instantly condemned to suffer death and the confiscation of their
property under the Law of December 16, 1792--a law passed by the
Girondists themselves, and highly approved by 'the soul of the Gironde.'

Unobserved in the general excitement Valaze drove the dagger into his
heart, and crying out, 'I am a dead man!' fell bleeding to the floor.
When his companions had been removed by the guards, Fouquier-Tinville
rose again in his place, and requested that the tribunal would order the
corpse before them to be taken with the living criminals to the Place de
la Revolution, and there with them _guillotined_!

From this even the Convention shrank. But the dead body of Valaze was in
fact carried in a little cart through the streets of Paris, behind the
dismal cortege of the condemned, 'lying stretched upon the back, and the
face uncovered,' on October 31. After the execution was over it was
flung, with the remains of his companions, into a great pit.

This was the end, for Madame Roland and her worshippers, in four short
years, of the 'great reformation' of which, on May 17, 1790, she had
written to one of her friends that it could only be carried through by
'burning many more chateaux!'

For France, and the French people, the end of it, I fear, has not yet
come.

Rapine and confiscation have not been unknown, unfortunately, in the
history of any civilised State. But under what modern government,
excepting the government of the first French Republic, has sheer
pillage, mere downright robbery, been recognised as a legitimate
instrument of political propagandism, and, in fact, as a title to
prop