There lies at the foundation of history a supreme sadness and melancholy. This never-ending series of illusions and deceptions, errors and afflictions, faults and crimes; this rage, and passion, and folly; so many efforts and fatigues, so many dangers, tortures, and tears, so much blood, such revolutions, catastrophies, cataclysms of every sort,—and all for what? Wretched humanity, rolling its stone of Sisyphus from age to age, inspires far more compassion than contempt. The painful reflections caused by the annals of all peoples are perhaps more sombre for the French Revolution than for any other period. Edgar Quinet justly laments over the inequality between the sacrifices of the victims and the results obtained by posterity. He affirms that in other histories one thing reconciles us to the fury of men, and that is the speedy fecundity of the blood they shed; for example, when one sees that of the martyrs flow, one also sees Christianity spread over the earth from the depth of the catacombs; while amongst us, the blood which streamed most abundantly and from such lofty sources, did not find soil equally well prepared. And the illustrious historian exclaims sadly: "The supreme consolation has been refused to our greatest dead; their blood has not been a seed of virtue and independence for their posterity. If they should reappear once more, they would feel themselves tortured again, and on a worse scaffold, by the denial of their descendants; they would hurl at us again the same adieu: 'O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!'"
[[1]] Ami du Peuple, No. 429.
[[2]] Ami du Peuple, No. 539.
[[3]] La Publiciste de la République, No. 211.
[[4]] Edgar Quinet, La Révolution, t. 11.
INDEX.
Abbey prison, the, massacre of the prisoners of, [363].
Ankarstroem, Captain, the assassin of Gustavus III., [37], [41].