At eventide, from that tremendous height,
Headlong descended to eternal night,
On sea-weed beds to rest in slumbers sweet,
The boundless main her tomb, the waves her winding-sheet.
NINE O’CLOCK.
The night of the 30th of June, 1793, is memorable in the prison annals of Paris, as the last night in confinement of the leaders of the famous Girondin party in the first French Revolution. On the morning of the 31st, the twenty-one deputies, who represented the department of the Gironde, were guillotined, to make way for Robespierre and the Reign of Terror.
With these men fell the last revolutionists of that period, who shrank from founding a republic on massacre; who recoiled from substituting for a monarchy of corruption, a monarchy of bloodshed. The elements of their defeat lay as much in themselves, as in the events of their time. They were not, as a party, true to their own convictions; they temporised; they fatally attempted to take a middle course amid the terrible emergencies of a terrible epoch, and they fell—fell before worse men, because those men were in earnest.
Condemned to die, the Girondins submitted nobly to their fate; their great glory was the glory of their deaths. The speech of one of them, on hearing his sentence pronounced, was a prophecy of the future, fulfilled to the letter.
“I die,” he said to the Jacobin judges, the creatures of Robespierre, who tried him, “I die at a time when the people have lost their reason: you will die on the day when they recover it.”