My feeble nature might shrink,
though theirs did not, from the proof; but my reason and my ambition
tell me, that it would be a good bargain to purchase their merits with
their fate.
For which of his vices did that great magistrate, D'Espremenil, lose his
fortune and his head? What were the abominations of Malesherbes, that
other excellent magistrate, whose sixty years of uniform virtue was
acknowledged, in the very act of his murder, by the judicial butchers,
who condemned him? On account of what misdemeanors was he robbed of his
property, and slaughtered with two generations of his offspring; and the
remains of the third race, with a refinement of cruelty, and lest they
should appear to reclaim the property forfeited by the virtues of their
ancestor, confounded in an hospital with the thousands of those unhappy
foundling infants, who are abandoned, without relation, and without
name, by the wretchedness or by the profligacy of their parents?
Is the fate of the queen of France to produce this softening of
character? Was she a person so very ferocious and cruel as, by the
example of her death, to frighten us into common humanity? Is there no
way to teach the emperor a softening of character, and a review of his
social situation and duty, but his consent, by an infamous accord with
regicide, to drive a second coach with the Austrian arms through the
streets of Paris, along which, after a series of preparatory horrors,
exceeding the atrocities of the bloody execution itself, the glory of
the imperial race had been carried to an ignominious death? Is this a
lesson of MODERATION to a descendant of Maria Theresa, drawn from the
fate of the daughter of that incomparable woman and sovereign? If he
learns this lesson from such an object, and from such teachers, the man
may remain, but the king is deposed.
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