Brooding
over the miseries of her country, till her imagination became heated and
disordered, this young woman seems to have conceived some hopeless plan
of redress from expostulation with Robespierre, whom she regarded as a
principal in all the evils she deplored. The difficulty of obtaining an
audience of him irritated her to make some comparison between an
hereditary sovereign and a republican despot; and she avowed, that, in
desiring to see Robespierre, she was actuated only by a curiosity to
"contemplate the features of a tyrant."--On being examined by the
Committee, she still persisted that her design was "seulement pour voir
comment etoit fait un tyrant;" and no instrument nor possible means of
destruction was found upon her to justify a charge of any thing more than
the wild and enthusiastic attachment to royalism, which she did not
attempt to disguise. The influence of a feminine propensity, which often
survives even the wreck of reason and beauty, had induced her to dress
with peculiar neatness, when she went in search of Robespierre; and, from
the complexion of the times, supposing it very probable a visit of this
nature might end in imprisonment and death, she had also provided herself
with a change of clothes to wear in her last moments.
Such an attention in a beautiful girl of eighteen was not very unnatural;
yet the mean and cruel wretches who were her judges, had the littleness
to endeavour at mortifying, by divesting her of her ornaments, and
covering her with the most loathsome rags.
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