*It would be too voluminous to enumerate all the contrasts of
manners and character exhibited during the French revolution--The
philosophic Condorcet, pursuing with malignancy his patron, the Duc
de la Rochefoucault, and hesitating with atrocious mildness on the
sentence of the King--The massacres of the prisons connived at by
the gentle Petion--Collot d'Herbois dispatching, by one discharge of
cannon, three hundred people together, "to spare his sensibility"
the talk of executions in detail--And St. Just, the deviser of a
thousand enormities, when he left the Committee, after his last
interview, with the project of sending them all to the Guillotine,
telling them, in a tone of tender reproach, like a lover of romance,
"Vous avez fletri mon coeur, je vais l'ouvrir a la Convention."--
Madame Roland, in spite of the tenderness of her sex, could coldly
reason on the expediency of a civil war, which she acknowledged
might become necessary to establish the republic. Let those who
disapprove this censure of a female, whom it is a sort of mode to
lament, recollect that Madame Roland was the victim of a celebrity
she had acquired in assisting the efforts of faction to dethrone the
King--that her literary bureau was dedicated to the purpose of
exasperating the people against him--and that she was considerably
instrumental to the events which occasioned his death.
Pages:
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585