two life-guardsmen whom they had massacred below the windows of the king, and whose bloody heads they bore in triumph upon pikes. Surely, Satan himself, says Lavalette, must have invented the placing of a human head at the end of a lance, where the disfigured and pale features, the gory locks, the half open mouth, the closed eyes, images of death added to the salutations which the executioners made them perform in mockery of life, presented the most frightful spectacle that rage could have imagined. After this ferocious horde came the royal carriage, escorted by the Parisian National Guard, and a large troop of fish-women, the scum of their sex, and generally ugly as crime itself, who alternately embraced and insulted the soldiers. Several of these abandoned creatures were astride upon the cannon, celebrating by the most abominable songs all the crimes which they had committed or witnessed, while others, nearer the carriage, were singing allegorical airs, and by their gross gestures applying the insulting allusions in them to the queen. She, poor woman, had that morning fled for her life from a furious mob, who rushed into her room a few minutes after she had left it, and, enraged at finding their victim escaped, pierced her bed with their bayonets. Yet Bertrand de Molleville, who was an eye-witness of this distressing spectacle, says that amidst this clamor, this tumult, these songs, interrupted by frequent discharges of musketry, which the hand of a monster or an awkward person might have rendered so fatal, Marie Antoinette retained the most courageous tranquillity of mind, and an air of inexpressible nobleness and dignity. Once only she shuddered and turned deadly pale it was when she saw Madame de Genlis and her pupils evidently delighted at the sight of the procession. The young people were her relatives, and gratitude, if nothing else, should have restrained them from thus exulting over her downfall. No later than the first of January previous, she had prevailed upon the King to create Louis Philippe (their godson) Knight of the Holy Ghost, and with

the blue riband of the order he received a pension of a thousand crowns.

The initiation of Louis Philippe into the mysteries of political intrigue, was at a club originally founded in the village of Montrouge, near Paris, but which afterwards held its meetings in the apartment of Madame de Genlis, at the Palais Royal, literature cloaking its real designs, as the madness of the first Brutus concealed his vengeance.* Headed by the Abbé Siéyès, that mystic oracle of the Revolution, they used to deliberate schemes for gaining the Duke of Orleans the Regency, or, as some think, the throne itself. Louis Philippe entered into their plans with the ardor of youth, electioneering with great spirit for his father when he was a candidate for the States-General at Crespy. The Duke was elected, and also chosen at Villars-Cotherets, but he preferred to represent Crespy, because the voters of that district were the more patriotic of the two. At the opening procession of the States-General, he left his own. place vacant among the nobility, and walked with the deputies, abdicating the privileges of a Prince Royal, to assume the dignity of a citizen.

Lafayette, if we may credit Lamartine, instinctively hated in the Duke of Orleans an influential rival, and resolved at all risks to compel him to remove from the scene, by an .exercise of moral restraint or the fear of a state prosecution, and reside in England. The King was easily convinced of his plots to win the throne, and the Duke was at last forced to submit to an arbitrary exile, under the appearance of a diplomatic mission freely accepted. Before leaving, he gave Louis Philippe a separate establishment, and commended him to Mirabeau, one of those mysterious mortals described by Bossuet as the instruments of God's designs. Deriving a certain aristocracy of ideas from his birth, he took part with the people because he had shared in their oppressions,

* Lamartine's History of the Girondins.

and was carried by the same passions which sullied his private life, up to the loftiest paths of a public career. Though nervous most of the time under the influence of wine and love, he was able, at any moment, to retire from one of those voluptuous fêtes which still lingered about the court, and prepare, by the severe application of theories to facts, those profound and passionate displays of eloquence, with which he annihilated the old system, and would have renovated the new.

Such was the man chosen to initiate Louis Philippe into political life, and it is not strange that we find such entries as the following in the young Prince's journal: "September 10th, 1790.- In the evening we went to the theatre to see Brutus. Many allusions were made. When Brutus said 'Ye gods! Give me death sooner than slavery’— the whole house rang with the applause and bravos. All hats were up! It was superb. Another line ended with 'Be free, and without a king.' It was covered with plaudits." With such counsellors as Mirabeau and Madame de Genlis, Louis Philippe soon became thoroughly inoculated with the revolutionary spirit, and was chosen a member of the Jacobin club, then in the very zenith of its power. He thus chroni cles his admission into that wild assemblage, upon whose countenances was stamped "Revenge upon our oppressors," while their agitated lips pronounced those words - destined to be so terrible, though then pure-"Liberty, justice for the great masses of mankind." "November 2d, 1790. — I was yesterday admitted a member of the Jacobins, and much applauded. I returned thanks for the kind reception which they were so good as to give me, and I assured them that I should never deviate from the sacred duties of a good patriot and a good citizen."

Other entries in his journal show that his mentors impressed upon his mind the necessity of winning popular

*Bulwer's France.

favor, and that he carried their counsels into practice. He was a daily attendant at the public hospitals, as on the 2d of December, when he "dressed two patients, and gave one six, and the other three livres; " nor was the church neglected. On the 25th of December, he says, "I went yesterday morning to confession. I dined at the Palais Royal, and then went to the Philanthropic Society, whence I could not get away till eight o'clock. I went to the midnight mass at St. Eustache, returned at two in the morning, and got to bed at half past two. I performed my Christmas devotions at this mass."

Meanwhile the Duke of Orleans had returned from England, although Lafayette had sent his aid-de-camp to London, with an urgent request that he would prolong his absence. The counter arguments of Lachos, one of the favorites of Madame de Genlis, imputing his deference to Lafayette to cowardice, stirred his Bourbon blood, but on his arrival at Paris he lacked courage to put into execution projects of revenge, and sent a humble petition to the Ministry for the restoration of a commission he had previously held in the navy. Notwithstanding his conduct and that of his children, the King, with that kindness which the elder branch of the Bourbons has ever displayed towards the House of Orleans, appointed him Admiral. Upon receiving his commission, the Duke of Orleans waited upon the King, and read a long excuse for his past errors, in a voice nearly choked by emotion, and with those gestures, more eloquent than words, that add so much pathos to solemn explanations. The King, deeply affected, forgave him, and the Duke returned to the Palais Royal, reconciled with himself, and determined thenceforth to be loyal. His puny ambition was easily satisfied, and he would have become one of the humblest sycophants around the throne, had the court possessed the same forgiving disposition as the sovereign.

On the Sunday following this reconciliation, there was a grand reception at the Tuileries, and the Duke attended to

present his public homage, but was received with indignant glances by the courtiers, who had not been informed of his repentance and pardon. His entrance to the royal apartments was barred by the officers of the household, who turned their backs to him, and the servants passing at the time with the Queen's dinner, a voice cried, "look to the dishes," as though some notorious poisoner was present. The indignant Duke turned alternately pale and red, imagining that these insults were offered to him at the instigation of the King, and as he descended the staircase to leave the palace, withering remarks were made by an indignant crowd who followed him, some of whom even spat on him. He had entered the Tuileries appeased, he quitted it implacable; and finding on his return home Madame de Genlis and her clique happy to nourish his resentment, he was easily convinced by them that his only refuge against court persecutions was in the last ranks of the Democracy, and he enrolled himself resolutely in them to find safety or vengeance. Thenceforth Danton was his chief adviser, the Jacobin Club his favorite resort, and he followed the extreme party without hesitation, even to the Republic-to Regicide to Death! *

The children of the Duke of Orleans, indignant at the treatment their father had received at court, became more violently radical, and the young men wore constantly the uniform of the National Guard, to which Louis Philippe joined the red cap, an emblem which probably was originally derived from Phrygia, but had for upwards of a century been the distinctive headgear of a French galley slave. On the 9th of February, 1791, the three brothers went to register their names on the roll of the light infantry company of the National Guard in the parish of St. Roch, and seeing the clerk enter his titles of rank and nobility, the eldest took the pen, blotted out what had been written, and

* Lamartine's History of the Girondins.