June 3, 1794.
The individual sufferings of the French may perhaps yet admit of increase; but their humiliation as a people can go no farther; and if it were not certain that the acts of the government are congenial to its principles, one might suppose this tyranny rather a moral experiment on the extent of human endurance, than a political system.
Either the vanity or cowardice of Robespierre is continually suggesting to him plots for his assassination; and on pretexts, at once absurd and atrocious, a whole family, with near seventy other innocent people as accomplices, have been sentenced to death by a formal decree of the convention.
One might be inclined to pity a people obliged to suppress their indignation on such an event, but the mind revolts when addresses are presented from all quarters to congratulate this monster's pretended escape, and to solicit a farther sacrifice of victims to his revenge.— The assassins of Henry the Fourth had all the benefit of the laws, and suffered only after a legal condemnation; yet the unfortunate Cecilia Renaud, though evidently in a state of mental derangement, was hurried to the scaffold without a hearing, for the vague utterance of a truth, to which every heart in France, not lost to humanity, must assent. Brooding over the miseries of her country, till her imagination became heated and disordered, this young woman seems to have conceived some hopeless plan of redress from expostulation with Robespierre, whom she regarded as a principal in all the evils she deplored. The difficulty of obtaining an audience of him irritated her to make some comparison between an hereditary sovereign and a republican despot; and she avowed, that, in desiring to see Robespierre, she was actuated only by a curiosity to "contemplate the features of a tyrant."—On being examined by the Committee, she still persisted that her design was "seulement pour voir comment etoit fait un tyrant;" and no instrument nor possible means of destruction was found upon her to justify a charge of any thing more than the wild and enthusiastic attachment to royalism, which she did not attempt to disguise. The influence of a feminine propensity, which often survives even the wreck of reason and beauty, had induced her to dress with peculiar neatness, when she went in search of Robespierre; and, from the complexion of the times, supposing it very probable a visit of this nature might end in imprisonment and death, she had also provided herself with a change of clothes to wear in her last moments.
Such an attention in a beautiful girl of eighteen was not very unnatural; yet the mean and cruel wretches who were her judges, had the littleness to endeavour at mortifying, by divesting her of her ornaments, and covering her with the most loathsome rags. But a mind tortured to madness by the sufferings of her country, was not likely to be shaken by such puerile malice; and, when interrogated under this disguise, she still preserved the same firmness, mingled with contempt, which she had displayed when first apprehended. No accusation, nor even implication, of any person could be drawn from her, and her only confession was that of a passionate loyalty: yet an universal conspiracy was nevertheless decreed by the Convention to exist, and Miss Renaud, with sixty-nine others,* were sentenced to the guillotine, without farther trial than merely calling over their names.
* It is worthy of remark, that the sixty-nine people executed as accomplices of Miss Renaud, except her father, mother, and aunt, were totally unconnected with her, or with each other, and had been collected from different prisons, between which no communication could have subsisted.
* It is worthy of remark, that the sixty-nine people executed as accomplices of Miss Renaud, except her father, mother, and aunt, were totally unconnected with her, or with each other, and had been collected from different prisons, between which no communication could have subsisted.
* It is worthy of remark, that the sixty-nine people executed as accomplices of Miss Renaud, except her father, mother, and aunt, were totally unconnected with her, or with each other, and had been collected from different prisons, between which no communication could have subsisted.
* It is worthy of remark, that the sixty-nine people executed as accomplices of Miss Renaud, except her father, mother, and aunt, were totally unconnected with her, or with each other, and had been collected from different prisons, between which no communication could have subsisted.