Page:Vol 4 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/17



the opening of the nineteenth century Europe was in a state of unusual commotion. There had come from Corsica to Paris a bow-legged, olive-cheeked little man who had set the rulers of the earth and their wise men by the ears. They were exceedingly frightened, and knew not what to do. For this personage had set at work several hundred thousands of their subjects killing each other; to what purpose, it puzzled them to say, unless it was to show how to make dupes and donkeys of them all only donkeys are too sensible beasts to cut and mangle and murder each other in such a wholesale manner at the instigation of any one.

Louis XVI. was guillotined in 1793. His predecessor, after a life of debauchery with his Pompadours and Dubarrys, and under the intellectual libertinism of Voltaire and Rousseau, had died leaving a debt of four thousand millions of livres. After that was the tiers état, followed by the storming of the Bastille