object of carrying off the king from Paris, of dissolving the Assembly by force, and putting La Fayette and Bailly to death.  The evidence with which it was pretended to support these charges broke down on every point, and its failure of itself established the prisoner’s innocence, even without the aid of his own defense, which was lucid and eloquent.  But the marquis was known to be a Royalist in feeling, and, though very poor, to stand high in the confidence of the princes.  The demagogues collected mobs round the courthouse to intimidate the judges, and the judges proved as base as the accusers themselves.  They professed, indeed, to fear not so much for their own lives as for the public tranquillity, but they pronounced him guilty.  One of them had even the effrontery to acknowledge his innocence to Favras himself, and to affirm that his life was a necessary sacrifice to the public peace.

No event since the attack on Versailles had caused Marie Antoinette equal anguish.  It showed that attachment to the king and herself was in itself regarded as an inexpiable crime, and her distress was greatly augmented when, on the Sunday following the execution of the marquis, some of his friends brought to the table where, as usual, she was dining in public with the king, the widowed marchioness and her orphaned son in deep mourning, and presented them to their majesties.  Their introducers evidently expected that the king, or at least the queen, by the distinguished reception which she would accord to them, would mark their sense of the merits of their late husband and father, and of the indignity of the sentence under which he had suffered.

Marie Antoinette was sadly embarrassed and distressed:  she was taken wholly by surprise; and it happened by a cruel perverseness of fortune that Santerre, the brewer, whose ruffianly and ferocious enmity to the whole royal family, and especially to herself, had been conspicuous throughout the worst outrages of the past summer and autumn, was on the same day on duty at the palace as commander of one of the battalions of the Parisian Guard, and was standing behind her chair when the marchioness and her son were introduced.  Her embarrassment and all her feelings on the occasion were described by herself in the course of the afternoon to Madame Campan.

After the dinner was over, she went up to her attendant’s room, saying that it was a relief to find herself where she could weep at her ease; for weep she must at the folly of the ultra-Royalists.  “We can not but be destroyed,” she continued, “when we are attacked by people who unite every kind of talent to every kind of wickedness; and when we are defended by folks who are indeed very estimable, but who have no just notion of our position.  They have now compromised me with both parties, in their presenting to me the widow and son of Favras.  If I had been free to do as I would, I should have taken the child of a man who had just been sacrificed