Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/191

Rh did in the magic glass of Hecate—a whole long line of kings, who to the wail of hanger and agony around them had been deaf as the walls of those palaces where, in shameless orgies, were dissipated the revenues of the State: so that in Louis XVI. they beheld, not him alone, but the scapegoat of an entire dynasty.

On the 20th of January 1793, by a considerable majority in the Convention, he was sentenced to death.

What Madame Roland's vote would have been does not appear. Michelet, with his fondness for diving into the recesses of the human heart, would like to know who represented her opinion on this memorable occasion. The man she loved, he declares, though no one, according to him, was lofty enough to be her ideal. In Michelet's time the secret of that noble spirit had not been divulged, nor had those heart-moving letters been discovered which cast such a new, pathetic light on her life. But this student of womanhood felt that under the Amazon's breast-plate there throbbed a passion as strong as the nature which curbed it. His conjecture as to Bancal des Issarts was wrong; but, passing in review the men she confided in, he characterises Buzot as the heart of the Gironde. A subtle touch this, the fire and daring with which this man always took the lead in the struggle of parties springing not from his heart only, but from that of the heroine of the Gironde, Buzot voted for the King's death, with the proviso of its ratification by the people.

Already, during the King's trial, the position of the Girondins in Paris had grown full of peril. The Rolands had become the target at which Hébert through his paper, the Père Duchesne, daily flung the dirt of his scurrilous vituperations. Marat, to whom every person in power straightway became a traitor, held them up