Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/190

180

the 11th of December 1792, the Prince, whose coronation a few years ago had been hailed as the advent of better times, appeared as a prisoner to be tried at the bar of the Convention. Was it only a few years ago, or had centuries elapsed, since he, who now stood there attainted, shorn of crown and titles, wrapped in unbecoming brown overcoat, had lorded it in the glittering halls of Versailles, and been pensively observed in his royal scarlet and gold uniform, amid his fawning courtiers, by an obscure daughter of Paris? To the heir of the proudest race of kings in Europe the total subversion of the old order of things must have had something so stunning in its effects that be might well have questioned his own identity. There must have crept over him a sense of phantasmagoric unreality, which, superadded to temperament, may have helped to produce his singular apathy under such astonishing circumstances.

Was ever in history sterner illustration of the inexorable truth: "The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation"! For behind Louis, in Louis himself—more weak than wicked, the people saw—even as Macbeth