And taking the golden earrings from her ears, the rings from her fingers, she cast them before her hearers.
Her power was so great, that during every sudden outbreak her “nod” condemned any man brought before her, to death; her “Let him go,” set him at liberty.
She was mad for years before she was placed in the asylum where she ended her days, twenty years after the death of the King and Queen. Not a Frenchwoman, but born at Liège, she had been brought up respectably; she was even accomplished; but at seventeen she had fallen a victim to the snares of a young French nobleman.
Thus fallen, she threw herself into all shapes of debauchery; and when the Revolution broke out, she came to France, to hunt down and destroy the man who had destroyed her.
This she did in the raging time to come, of which I have to tell, and she showed him no mercy.
Neither found she any mercy for herself. The furies of the Revolution—the tricoteuses—seized her, stripped her to the skin, and whipped her in public, as an obscene prostitute. This act brought into active force the latent madness from which she had been suffering for some time. She was removed to a madhouse, and there she dragged through twenty years of life. In fierce memory of the indignity which had been put upon her, she would never put on any clothing; and so she lived, clutching the bars of her den, screaming, alternately, “Blood!” and “Liberty!”
It took twenty years to enfeeble her constitution, and to wear her life away into the peacefulness of death.
She was the greatest enemy the Queen had. She declared Marie Antoinette as frail as herself; for this demon in woman’s shape insanely gloried in her condition. And when she gloried in this statement against the “Austrian”—the most opprobrious name the people could find to cast at the Queen—her hearers applauded loudly.
So the months drifted on, the events of every day darkening the fortunes of the royal family.