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 greatest orations, probably one of the greatest combinations of sound reasoning, sagacity and eloquence which has ever been displayed in the annals of French politics. He pronounced in favour of an appeal to the people. He pictured the consequences of that temper of vengeance which animated the Parisian mob and was fatally controlling the policy of the Convention, and the prostration which would ensue to France after even a successful struggle with a European coalition, which would spring up after the murder of the king. The great effort failed; and four days afterwards something happened which still further endangered Vergniaud and his whole party. This was the discovery of a note signed by him along with Gaudet and Gensonne and presented to the king two or three weeks before the 10th of August. It contained nothing but sound and patriotic suggestions, but it was greedily seized upon by the enemies of the Gironde as evidence of treason. On the 16th of January 1793 the vote began to be taken in the Convention upon the punishment of the king. Vergniaud voted early, and voted for death. The action of the great Girondist was and will always remain inscrutable, but it was followed by a similar verdict from nearly the whole party which he led. On the 17th Vergniaud presided at the Convention, and it fell to him, labouring under the most painful excitement, to announce the fatal result of the voting. Then for many weeks he sank, exhausted, into silence.

When the institution of a revolutionary tribunal was proposed, Vergniaud vehemently opposed the project, denouncing the tribunal as a more awful inquisition than that of Venice, and avowing that his party would all die rather than consent to it. Their death by stratagem had already been planned, and on the 10th of March they had to go into hiding. On the 13th Vergniaud boldly exposed the conspiracy in the Convention. The antagonism caused by such an attitude had reached a significant point when on the 10th of April Robespierre himself laid his accusation before the Convention. He fastened especially upon Vergniaud’s letter to the king and his support of the appeal to the people as a proof that he was a moderate in its then despised sense. Vergniaud made a brilliant extemporaneous reply, and the attack for the moment failed. But now, night after night, Vergniaud and his colleagues found themselves obliged to change their abode, to avoid assassination, a price being even put upon their heads. Still with unfaltering courage they continued their resistance to the dominant faction, till on the 2nd of June 1793 things came to a head. The Convention was surrounded with an armed mob, who clamoured for the “twenty-two.” In the midst of this it was forced to continue its deliberations. The decree of accusation was voted, and the Girondists were proscribed.

Vergniaud was offered a safe retreat. He accepted it only for a day, and then returned to his own dwelling. He was kept under surveillance there for nearly a month, and in the early days of July was imprisoned in La Force. He carried poison with him, but never used it. His tender affection for his relatives abundantly appears from his correspondence, along with his profound attachment to the great ideas of the Revolution and his noble love of country. On one of the walls of the Carmelite convent to which for a short time the prisoners were removed Vergniaud wrote in letters of blood: “Potius mori quam foedari.” Early in October the Convention brought forward its indictment of the twenty-two Girondists. They were sent for trial to the Revolutionary tribunal, before which they appeared on the 27th of October. The procedure was a travesty of justice. Early on the morning of the 31st of October 1793 the Girondists were conveyed to the scaffold, singing on the way the Marseillaise and keeping up the strain till one by one they were guillotined. Vergniaud was executed last. He died unconfessed, a philosopher and a patriot.

VERHAEREN, ÉMILE (1855–), Belgian poet, was born at Saint-Amand, near Antwerp, on the 21st of May 1855. He was sent to school at Ghent, where he formed a friendship with Georges Rodenbach. He studied at the university of Louvain, and there started a journal, La Semaine, which he edited in conjunction with the operatic singer Van Dyck. La Semaine was suppressed by the authorities, as was its successor, Le Type, in which Verhaeren had as fellow-workers Max Waller, Iwan Gilkin and Albert Giraud. In 1881 he was admitted to the bar at Brussels, but he soon devoted his whole energies to literature, and especially to the organs of “young Belgium,” La Jeune Belgique and L’Art moderne, making himself especially the champion of the impressionist painters. Verhaeren learnt his art of poetry from the great Flemish artists, and in his early robust works, Les Flamandes (1883) and Les Moines (1886), he displays similar qualities of strength, sometimes degenerating into violence. A period of physical weakness followed, translated into terms of poetry in three volumes of verse, Les Soirs (1887), Les Débâcles (1888) and Les Flambeaux noirs (1889). Au bord de la route (1890) and Les Apparus dans mes chemins (1891) followed. Verhaeren then passed from applying his pictorial method to psychological studies to the task of individualizing the towns, villages and fields of his native country, the first outcome being his Campagnes hallucinees (1893). In Villages illusoires he describes the tragedy of the fields and farms deserted by the people in their race to the towns, and in Les Villes tentaculaires (1895) the great industrial centres devouring the surrounding country. Later volumes of poems are Les Heures claires (1896), Les Visages de la vie (1899), Les Petites Légendes (1900), Les Forces tumultueuses (1901); Les Tendresses premieres (1904). In 1898 he wrote a lyric drama Les Aubes, in 1900 a four-act piece Le Cloître, represented both in Brussels and Paris, and in 1901 a historical drama Philippe II.

VERKHNE-UDINSK, a town of Asiatic Russia, in East Siberia, province of Transbaikalia, on the right bank of the Uda, at its confluence with the Selenga, 102 m. by rail E. of Lake Baikal, to which steamers ply. Pop. (1883) 4130; (1897) 8002. It was founded as a small fort in 1668, and is a centre for the overland trade in tea with China, and an emporium both for grain and animal products, exported, and for metals, machinery and manufactured goods, imported. Its yearly fair is of great importance.

VERLAINE, PAUL (1844–1896), French lyric poet, was born at Metz on the 30th of March 1844. He was the son of one of Napoleon’s soldiers, who had become a captain of engineers. Paul Verlaine was educated in Paris, and became clerk in an insurance company. He was a member of the Parnassian circle, with Catulle Mendès, Sully Prudhomme, François Coppée and the rest. His first volume of poems, the Poèmes saturniens (1866), was written under Parnassian influences, from which the Fêtes gal antes (1869), as of a Watteau of poetry, began a delicate escape; and in La Bonne Chanson (1870) the defection was still more marked. He married in 1870 Mile. Mautet. During the Commune he was involved with the authorities for having sheltered his friends, and was obliged to leave France. In 1871 the strange young poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud came somewhat troublingly into his life, into which drink had already brought a lasting disturbance. With Rimbaud he wandered over France, Belgium, England, until a pistol-shot, fortunately ill-aimed, against his companion brought upon him two years of imprisonment at Mons. Solitude, confinement and thought converted a pagan into a Catholic, without, however, rooting out what was most human in the pagan; and after many years' silence he published Sagesse (1881), a collection of religious poems, which, for humble and passionate conviction, as well as originality of poetic beauty, must be ranked with the finest religious poems ever written. Romances sans paroles, composed during the intervals of wandering, appeared in 1874, and shows us Verlaine at his most perfect moment of artistic self-possession, before he has quite found what is deepest in himself. He returned to France in 1875. His wife had obtained a divorce from him, and Verlaine made another short stay in England, acting as a