She listened to her doom of immediate death with a smile, and was conducted back to the prison, to be led from thence to the guillotine. A little after seven o'clock on this same evening a cart issued from the Conciergerie, bearing Charlotte, in the red robe of a murderess, to the guillotine. A vast throng crowded the streets, most of whom assailed her with howls and execrations. She looked upon them with a serene smile, as if she were riding on an excursion of pleasure. She was bound to the plank. The glittering axe glided through the grove, and the executioner, lifting her severed head, exhibited it to the people, and then brutally struck the cheek.
Robespierre and Danton, the idols of the mob, now divided the supreme power between them. The organization of a revolutionary government was simply the machine by means of which they operated.
On the 10th of August there was another magnificent festival in Paris to commemorate the adoption of the Jacobin Constitution. The celebrated painter David arranged the fête with great artistic skill, and again all Paris, though on the verge of ruin, was in a blaze of illumination and in a roar of triumph. The Austrian armies were now within fifteen days' march of Paris, and there was no organized force which could effectually arrest their progress. But the fear of the old Bourbon despotism rallied the masses to maintain, in preference, even the horrors of Jacobin ferocity. The aristocrats crushed the people; the Jacobins crushed the aristocrats. The populace naturally preferred the latter rule.
And now France rose, as a nation never rose before. At the motion of Danton it was decreed on the 23rd of August,
"From this moment until when the enemy shall be driven from the territory of the French Republic, all the French shall be in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. The young men shall go forth to fight. The married men shall forge the arms and transport the supplies. The women shall make tents and clothes, and attend on the hospitals. The children shall make lint out of rags; the old men shall cause themselves to be carried to the public places, to excite the courage of the warriors, to preach hatred of kings and love of the Republic."
MARCH OF VOLUNTEERS.