rising their trial; the indictment | throughout all the revolution; against them was general, but its endeavouring to convert everyspecific charges affected only five thing to their own profit, and even or six of the accused. They in- permitting the massacres of Sepsisted upon the right of separate tember, in order to cut off some of defence; the Jacobins, the Com- their enemies among the victims. mittee of Public Safety, and the Convention, held this demand decisive evidence of a new conspiracy. To obviate its supposed danger, and guard against the effect of the well-known eloquence of the accused, which had already strongly moved the audience, the Revolutionary Tribunal, after the trial had proceeded some days, obtained from the Convention a decree, authorising them to convict and pass sentence, as soon as they were convinced of the guilt of the accused, whether they had been heard in their defence or not. The grounds of the accusation were of the most contemptible kind; Chaumette recounted all the struggles of the municipality with the Côté Droit, without adding a single fact that could inculpate the accused; the wretch, Hébert, recounted the particulars of his arrest by the Commission of Twelve, and alleged that Roland had endeavoured to corrupt the public writers, by offering to buy up his obscene journal, the Père Duchesne; Detournelle deponed that the accused had exerted themselves to crush the municipality, declared against the massacres in the prisons, and laboured to institute a department guard. Chabot was the most virulent of the witnesses against them; he ascribed to them a Machiavellian policy The prosecution lasted nine days. At the end of that time the jury declared themselves convinced; the eloquence of Vergniaud, the vehemence of Brissot, had pleaded in vain. The Court then read to the accused the decree of the Convention, empowering them to terminate the proceedings as soon as the jury had declared their minds made up. They saw upon this that their fate was determined, as they were to be condemned, without having been heard in their defence. They all rose, and, by loud expressions of indignation, drowned the voice of the president, who read their sentence. Valazé stabbed himself with a poniard, and perished in presence of the court, who immediately ordered that his dead body should be borne on a car to the place of execution, and beheaded with the other prisoners. La Source exclaimed: "I die at a time when the people had lost their reason: you will die as soon as they recover it." The other prisoners embraced each other, and exclaimed, "Vive la République !" The audience, though chiefly composed of the assassins of September 2d, were melted to tears. The anxiety of his friends had provided Vergniaud with a certain and speedy poison: he refused to make use of it, in order that he the proscribed deputies, had escaped soon after the 2d of June from Paris. Tired of wandering through the provinces, he returned to the capital, and lived concealed in the might accompany his friends to the scaffold. The eloquence of Vergniaud, which poured forth the night before his execution on the expiring liberty of France in strains of unprecedented splen-house of one of those faithful friends, dour, entranced even the melancholy inmates of the prison. The illustrious prisoners were conducted, on the 31st of October, to the place of execution. They marched together with a firm step, singing the revolutionary song, which they applied by a slight change to their own situation : "Allons enfans de la patrie, Le jour de glorie est arrivé Contre nous de la tyrannie Le couteau sanglant est levé." When they arrived at the place of execution they mutually embraced, exclaiming, "Vive la République!" Sillery ascended first; he bowed with a grave air to the people, and received with unshrinking firmness the fatal stroke. They all died with the resolution of Romans, protesting with their last breath their attachment to freedom and the republic. A young man, named Girey Dufocé, was brought to the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The president asked if he had been a friend of Brissot. "I had that happiness." "What is your opinion of him ?" "That he lived like Aristides, and died like Sidney!" was the intrepid answer. forthwith sent to the scaffold, where he perished with the firmness of his departed friend. He was Rabaud St. Etienne, one of the most enlightened and virtuous of of whom the revolution produced so many examples. His wife, influenced by the most tender attachment, incessantly watched over his safety. In the street, one day, she met one of the Jacobins, who assured her of his interest in her husband, and professed his desire to give him an asylum in his own house. Rabaud being informed of the circumstance, and desirous of saving his generous host from farther danger, informed the Jacobin of his place of retreat, and assigned an hour of the night for him to come and remove him from it. The perfidious wretch came accompanied by gensdarmes, who dragged their victim, with his friendly host and hostess, to the Revolutionary Tribunal, whence they were sent to the scaffold. In despair at having been the instrument, however innocent, of such treachery, his wife, in the flower of youth and beauty, put herself to death. Madame Roland was the next victim. This heroic woman had been early involved in the proscription of the Girondists, of whom her splendid talents had almost rendered her the head. Confined in the prison of the Abbaye, she employed the tedious months of captivity in composing the memoirs, which so well illustrate her eventful life. With a firm hand she traced, in that gloomy abode, the joyous as well | composed by herself the night as the melancholy periods of her existence; the brilliant dreams and ardent patriotism of her youth; the stormy and eventful scenes of her maturer years; the horrors and anguish of her later days. While suffering under the fanaticism of the people, when about to die under the violence of the mob, she never abandoned the principles of her youth, or regretted her martyrdom in the cause of freedom. thoughts of her daughter and her husband sometimes melted her to tears, she regained her firmness on every important occasion. memoirs evince unbroken serenity of mind, though she was frequently interrupted in their composition by the cries of those whom the executioners were dragging from the adjoining cells to the scaffold. If the Her Her On the day of her trial she was dressed with scrupulous care in white. Her fine black hair fell in profuse curls to her waist; but the display of its beauty was owing to her jailors, who had deprived her of all means of dressing it. She chose that dress as emblematic of the purity of her mind. advocate, M. Chaveau Lagarde, visited her to receive her last instructions. Drawing a ring from her finger, she said—" To-morrow I shall be no more; I know well the fate which awaits me; your kind assistance could be of no avail; it would endanger you without saving me. Do not, therefore, I pray you, come to the Tribunal, but accept this as the last testimony of my regard." Her defence, before her trial, is one of the most eloquent and touching monuments of the revolution. Her answers to the interrogatories of the judges, the dignity of her manner, the beauty of her figure, melted even the revolutionary audience with pity. Finding they could implicate her in no other way, the president asked her if she was acquainted with the place of her husband's retreat. She replied, that "whether she knew it or not she would not reveal it, and that there was no law by which she was obliged, in a court of justice, to violate the strongest feelings of nature." Upon this she was immediately condemned. When the reading of her sentence was concluded, she rose and said, “You judge me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavour to imitate their firmness on the scaffold." She regained her prison with an elastic step and beaming eye. Her whole soul appeared absorbed in the heroic feelings with which she was animated. She was conveyed to the scaffold in the same car with a man whose firmness was not equal to her own. While passing along the streets, her whole anxiety appeared to be to support his courage. She did this with so much simplicity and effect, that she frequently brought a smile on the lips which were about to perish. At the place of execution she bowed before the gigantic statue of Liberty, and pronounced the memorable words, "O Liberty! how many crimes | his misfortunes. In his pocket are committed in your name." When they arrived at the foot of the scaffold, she had the generosity to renounce, in favour of her companion, the privilege of being first executed. "Ascend first," said she; "let me at least spare you the pain of seeing my blood flow." Turning to the executioner, she asked if he would consent to that arrangement; he replied, "that his orders were that she should die the first." "You cannot," said she, with a smile, "I am sure, refuse a woman her last request ?" Undismayed by the spectacle which immediately ensued, she calmly bent her head under the guillotine, and perished with the serenity she had evinced ever since her imprisonment. Madame Roland had predicted that her husband would not long survive her. Her prophecy was speedily fulfilled. A few days afterwards, he was found dead on the road between Paris and Rouen; he had stabbed himself in that situation, that he might not, by the situation in which his body was found, betray the generous friends who had sheltered him in was contained a letter, in these terms :-"Whoever you are, O passenger! who discover my body, respect the remains of the unfortunate. They are those of a man who consecrated his whole life to be useful to his country; who died as he had lived, virtuous and unsullied. May my fellow-citizens embrace more humane sentiments; not fear, but indignation, made me quit my retreat when I heard of the murder of my wife. I loathed a world stained with so many crimes." The other chiefs of the party, dispersed in the provinces of France, underwent innumerable dangers, and made escapes more wonderful even than those which romance has figured. Louvet owed his salvation to the fidelity of a female attachment. Barbaroux, Buzot, Pétion, and Valade, were concealed at St. Emilion, in a cavern, by a sister of Guadet. A few only escaped the anxious search of the Jacobins; their memoirs evince a curious proof of the indignation of enthusiastic but virtuous minds at the triumph of guilty ambition. THE REIGN OF TERROR. (Madame Roland's Memoirs.) A.D. 1793. I FEEL the resolution to pursue my undertaking grow feeble; the woes of my country torment me; the loss of my friends affects my spirits; an involuntary sadness penetrates my feelings, stifles my imagination, and withers my heart. France is no more than a vast theatre of carnage, a bloody arena where her own children tear each other to pieces. The enemy, favoured by intestine divisions, advances on every side; the towns of the north fall into his hands; Flanders and Alsace are about to become his prey; Spain ravages Roussillon; the Savoyards repulse an alliance which anarchy renders frightful; they turn towards their old master whose soldiers are crossing our frontiers; the rebels of La Vendée continue to desolate a great extent of territory; the people of Lyons, unwisely provoked, are strengthened in their resistance; Marseilles flies to their aid; the neighbouring departments are agitated; and in this universal confusion, in these multiplied struggles, there is nothing steady but the advance of the foreign powers. Our government is a kind of monster, of which the appearance and the conduct are equally revolting; it destroys all that it touches, and devours itself; this last excess is the sole consolation of its many victims. The armies, badly equipped and as badly led, fight and fly alternately like madmen; the able generals are accused of treason, because the representatives, who understand nothing about war, find fault with everything that they cannot comprehend, and condemn as aristocrats all persons more enlightened than themselves. A legislative body, which was characterised by feebleness from the first moment of its existence, held very keen debates for a time, while there remained in its bosom enough intelligence to know the danger, and courage to announce it; the honest and generous men who desired the good of their country and dared attempt to establish it, audaciously denounced |