Vigée rang out alone for a moment, and then was silenced for ever by the descending blade.

On the 8th of November Mdme. Roland was guillotined; the Great Citoyenne whom Carlyle apostrophizes: "Noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft, proud eyes, long black hair flowing down to the girdle, and as brave a heart as ever beat in woman's bosom!" Her husband followed her, as she had predicted he would, very soon, "dying by his own hand because he was unwilling to remain in a world polluted by crimes."

And the rest of the Girondists, where were they? Wandering in hunger, cold, and weariness; hiding by day lest they fell into the hands of their foes, and travelling by night; lost, yet afraid to ask their way; starving, but not daring to beg for food. Every aim of their lives defeated, their ideals shattered, their loved Republic dishonoured, their friends dead or dispersed, their wives and children in peril, and themselves in outlawry with a price upon their heads.

In the beautiful letter of farewell which Salles wrote to his wife, he tells of the suspense and misery he endured when, with de Cussi and de Grangeneuve, he at last found refuge in Bordeaux. De Grangeneuve's father hid them in an end of

his attic, and built up a partition so as to shut off all entrance except through the roof. Here they

cowered for three long weeks, ragged, without fire or light, expecting every moment to be seized, and finding the final discovery rather a relief than otherwise. Dragged from the house, and guillotined with their aged host and his sister, they met their fate with the calmness to be expected of such men.

Louvet, after enduring equal hardships, sweetened however, by the loving companionship of his intrepid "Lodoïska"-the wife he idolised-succeeded at last in escaping with her to Switzerland.

Petion, Buzot, and Barbaroux remained hidden in the caverns of St. Emilion for several months, but, their asylum being finally discovered, they fled to the woods, with Marcou's bloodhounds upon their track, and no prospect of help or safety. Barbaroux, too lame and footsore to walk without assistance, and finding that he was detaining his friends, shot himself, but the ball only shattered his jaw, and he was captured and sent to Bordeaux. He was guillotined on the 6th Messidor, five days after Salles, Gaudet, and Grange

neuve.

Buzot and Petion escaped from their pursuers, only to die of starvation, cold and exposure, and their

bodies were found a week afterwards all torn and

mangled by the dogs.

Such was the end of the Gironde, the party which in every office had shown the greatest courage and perseverance in defending the rights of the people. For eight stormy months they had braved the fury of a crazy populace, bearing threats and insults with dignity, and fearlessly upholding the cause of true liberty.

Personally, these men had little to gain and much to lose by the Revolution. Their social position was assured, their tastes and pursuits not of a kind to be affected by the caprices and injustice of the old régime, and they had no individual grievances. But they believed in the right of the people to be well-governed, and for the sake of this belief they left their homes and gave their substance and their lives. Loyal, patriotic, and self-sacrificing, their names shine out from the black back-ground of that awful time in letters of white light.

Buzot when writing those hurried but earnest appeals to posterity, which he calls mémoirs, in the caverns of St. Emilion, is touched at times with prophetic fire. "Honourable victims of tyranny!" he writes in glowing eulogy of his dead comrades, "you will be avenged! A day will come when posterity will pro

nounce your name only with the hushed voice of veneration and gratitude. Like Phocion and Sydney, you have died for the liberty of your country; like them, you will live for ever in the memory of man!"

Their very faults were those that sprang from their virtues; they were too proud to stoop to cunning, too pure to be corrupted, too ready to credit the people with their own steadfastness of purpose, and too sincere in their love of liberty to profane it to unworthy uses.

Had the Gironde had one half of the unscrupulous audacity of the Jacobins, it would have triumphed ; but it disdained the use of weapons which its adversaries wielded, and fought their cruelty and rapacity with eloquent speeches and moderate measures. It was, in fine, a party whose aims were high and patriotic; weak sometimes where they should have been strong, injudicious when cautious judgment was of vital importance, dilatory when immediate and concerted action might have saved them, but always clean-handed and free from the taint of selfinterest. Standing midway between the Royalists and the ultra-republicans, they represent all that was purest, noblest, and most disinterested of republican France.

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

Nec bene fecit; nec male fecit; sed inter fecit.

AMONG the many heroic women of history there is not one whose name thrills us with as strange a mingling of admiration and repulsion as that of Charlotte Corday. We shudder when we think of the cool, deliberately-planned murder; but after studying her beautiful womanly face, and tracing her life step by step, from innocent childhood to the unsullied girlhood full of noble dreams and unselfish desires, which ended upon the scaffold, we learn first to understand and then to love her.