some strikingly paradoxical conclusions.  They have substituted for Cambronne’s apocryphal saying at Waterloo the blunt sarcasm of the Duke of Wellington that there were a number of ladies at Brussels who were termed “la vieille garde,” and of whom it was said “elles ne meurent pas et se rendent toujours.”  They have led one eminent historian to apologise for the polygamous tendencies of Henry VIII.; another to advance the startling proposition that the “amazing” but, as the world has heretofore held, infamous Emperor Heliogabalus was a great religious reformer, who was in advance of his times; a third to present Lucrezia Borgia to the world as a much-maligned and very virtuous woman; and a fourth to tell us that the “ever pusillanimous” Barere, as he is called by M. Louis Madelin, was “persistently vilified and deliberately misunderstood.”  Biographical research has, moreover, destroyed many picturesque legends, with some of which posterity cannot part without a pang of regret.  We are reluctant to believe that William Tell was a mythological marksman and Gessler a wholly impossible bailiff.  Nevertheless the inexorable laws of evidence demand that this sacrifice should be made on the altar of historical truth.  M. Gastine has now ruthlessly quashed out another picturesque legend.  Tallien—­the “bristly, fox-haired” Tallien of Carlyle’s historical rhapsody—­and La Cabarrus—­the fair Spanish Proserpine whom, “Pluto-like, he gathered at Bordeaux”—­have so far floated down the tide of history as individuals who, like Byron’s Corsair, were

    Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.

Of the crimes there could, indeed, never have been any doubt, but posterity took but little heed of them, for they were amply condoned by the single virtue.  That virtue was, indeed, of a transcendent character, for it was nothing less than the delivery of the French nation from the Dahomey-like rule of that Robespierre who deluged France in blood, and who, albeit in Fouche’s words he was “terribly sincere,” at the same time “never in his life cared for any one but himself and never forgave an offence.”  Moreover, the act of delivery was associated with an episode eminently calculated to appeal to human sentiment and sympathy.  It was thought that the love of a fair woman whose life was endangered had nerved the lover and the patriot to perform an heroic act at the imminent risk of his own life.  Hence the hero became “Le Lion Amoureux,” and the heroine was canonised as “Notre Dame de Thermidor.”

M. Gastine has now torn this legend to shreds.  Under his pitiless analysis of the facts, nothing is left but the story of a contemptible adventurer, who was “a robber, a murderer, and a poltroon,” mated to a grasping, heartless courtesan.  Both were alike infamous.  The ignoble careers of both from the cradle to the grave do not, in reality, present a single redeeming feature.