papered, white flowers upon a shiny yellow ground, and the brute stone of the vaulting is hidden by a false ceiling, canvas painted with gilt stars upon indigo blue; but that was done a dozen years ago for the comfort of a Captain of the Guard. Nobody then could guess that a King would ever come to house in this grim second storey, raised high within the enormous mass of a Tower.

But this, though a cell, is not a barbarous place entirely. The mirror over the mantelpiece reflects the light of two candles and the green hue of the room; the silver sticks flank a gilded clock that rises from a fine gray-marble base, style Louis Quinze. The fire is dying, but near it you see a graceful writing-table, covered with green leather, and upon it lies the King's breviary, amidst papers and cut quills. Two barometers-two-hang

on the wall, and they are gilded; but not all the barometers in the land shall ever again register this King's weather as "set fair." A mahogany chest of drawers, marble-topped, a green baize screen, the bed, and some chairs upholstered in green damask almost complete the inventory; the late Captain of the Guard had a pretty taste in green. Oh, here are a shaving-glass and a lantern about which there is something to note. The glass is of the shape which English collectors call "Queen Anne," though the frame is not the usual walnut-wood, but lacquer, "art et sujets de la Chine." As for the lantern, of hammered copper, the warders cannot have examined the ornament closely, for it shows the fleur-de-lis.

Take a candle from the mantel and approach the small four-poster bed; the bed and the partition positively tremble with the sleeper's sonorous breathing. He does not turn over, nor mutter, nor start; even fitful rest just now would be impossible for the priest or

the valet on the other side of the partition, but they are retinue this is a King-and there is something Royal in this unbroken sleep on the brink. Move the light nearer, withdraw a curtain, and examine the looks of this man. The hair and face are gray, though he is not yet forty; he has had his Royal troubles, the curving lines at the corners of his eyes and lips are deep, the fatness of the cheek and dewlap is gone. Up stands, more disproportionate than ever, the big, thick, Bourbon nose, that fleshy promise of great achievements. "The nose of a Cæsar" Lavater said of it lately at Zurich, as he studied the King's portrait. No Cæsar this, however; he might have made a passable locksmith's journeyman, perhaps; but that great stubborn beak of his has led him down to a scaffold, poor bonhomme, from the proudest of thrones.

Abbé Edgeworth, waiting until the hour of his office should come, must have thought of that declension with wonder that was almost incredulity. The guillotine for a crowned head!judicial murder for this anointed son of St. Louis? But it was almost as marvellous that Henry Essex Edgeworth, Irish and the descendant of Orangemen, should have come in the end to share and comfort the last hours of Louis XVI. Born in the Protestant Rectory of Edgeworthstown, County Longford, he had none the less become a priest of the older Church-a son of the Sorbonne and not

of Trinity College, Dublin. He might Frenchify his name into Edgeworth de Firmont, but it is an Irish face which looks out at you from his portrait in the Carnavalet Museum. Refusing a bishopric, he has remained in Paris, confessor to the Irish colony there; and now the swirl and boil of troublous times have cast him up upon the bleak coast of the Temple prison, almost the only prêtre insermenté now left in

Paris, to become shriver and last consoler of Louis Capet.

The Abbé mumbles at his breviary while he waits and listens; three o'clock, four o'clock, the half-hour, the three-quarters-a dull horror seems to occupy the lessening spaces of time. Five o'clock sounds, and the valet steals into his master's room, to light the fire. The snoring ceases, a hand comes out between the bed-curtains, and the King's sleepy face appears. He yawns. "Five o'clock, Cléry? I'll get up." This might merely have been one of his winter mornings at Versailles when he was early afoot for the chase. "Thankee, I slept very well. Yesterday tired me, you see." That "yesterday" meant his tragical last interview, two hours long, with dear sobbing women and children who knew that to-day he must die. "Yesterday tired me, Cléry"-even the valet who knew him so well must have stared at him then; the tone was so placid, the lips so steady. "Where's the Abbé?”

"On my bed, Sire."

"Then where did you pass the night?"

"On a chair, your Majesty."

"I am sorry for that, my poor Cléry." This King's care for his servants lasted to the end.

His toilet began; gray hose, gray breeches, white vest, brown coat. Then the valet drew the chest of drawers into the middle of the room and arrayed the marble slab of it as an altar. Vestments and vessels had been brought from the church of Saint Jean-Saint-François; in the trésor there you may see the chasuble, stole, and maniple still. Arrayed in these red and white embroideries, the Abbé approached the makeshift altar; the valet read the responses and the King's last mass went on.

To read the accounts of those last

But

hours which Edgeworth and Cléry published, is to discover much that the critical sense must reject. Imagination can fob off unfacts upon memory, and often what might or ought to have been is deliberately foisted in among what actually was. The smaller and merely materialistic things are likeliest to be told true. We may be certain that Louis XVI. was not the man to say "How glad I am to possess the Christian principles I do! How should I manage without them now? with them death itself can seem gentle" ("Relation d'Edgeworth," I. 326). We may be pretty sure that he did not say, "Yes, there exists on high an incorruptible Judge who will know how to render me the justice which men refuse me below." Perhaps the Abbé said that to him, changing the pronouns, and the King answered "Oui." But everywhere in that part of the "Relation" the priest's hand is visible, painting a martyr's halo around the head which was soon to fall. A similar pious "study of imagination" may be seen in an account of the last hours of Charles Stuart. Two hours before daylight he appointed what clothes he would wear in his last journey to Whitehall. "Let me have a shirt on nore than ordinary, by reason the season is so sharp as probably may make me shake, which some observers will imagine proceeds from fear" ("Memoirs of the Two Last Years," edition 1813). So much is natural and true. But then the account goes on: "I would have no such imputation. I fear not Death! Death is not terrible to me; I bless my God I am prepared!" -the Fra Angelico nimbus again! One can almost see the scribe writhing in "I fear not Death!" and "Death is not terrible to me!" alternatively, and then by carelessness, or desire for emphasis, leaving them both in the page.

The real, stolid Louis XVI. is seen in this, that when at half-past six a

few drums began to sound in the fog which wrapped the streets near the Temple, he said "I expect that's for the National Guard to get together"; he positively listened for his funeral convoy to arrive, and opened the door for them before they were ready. Incapable of imagination, all he thought and said was banal prose. He did not need to think of justice, vindication, and the supernatural; confession, mass, and sacrament had assured his mind as to the future, the immediate, human question which troubled his habitual indecision was whether or not to see his wife again? Should he? Was there time? Had he waited too long? He pottered up and down his cell irresolutely. He went to the door and listened. Yes, there was time, just time, but—. He had promised the Queen a last interview, but-. Edgeworth, officiously, perhaps, had suggested that she might not be able to bear it, and "Perhaps you're right, Abbé," the husband said at last. "It might kill her-I'd better deprive myself." But next came some words from the heart. "I'll let her live in ignorance and hope as long as she can." Then his trembling fingers began to fiddle with the last gifts which he had prepared.

It was seven o'clock by now, and a chill brown light fell in down the embrasure. Standing as near the window as he might, the King gave a seal, a ring, and a little packet into the valet's charge. The ring, his "anneau de fiançailles," bore the inscription "M.A.A.A. 19 Aprilis 1770"-Maria Antonia Arciducissa Austriae, and the date of betrothal. "Give this to the Queen-tell her it hurts me to part with it," he said, his dull composure shaken. The seal bore the arms of France, the helmeted head of a child, and the letters LL. "Give this to the Dauphin"-Court habit did not let him say "my son." Upon the packet he

had written "cheveux de ma femme, de ma sœur, et de mes enfans"; the reliquary custom of wearing hair of beloved ones in rings and lockets has passed away, but that had been a precious possession to him. "Give this to the Queen"; his lips trembled. "Say to her and my dear children and sister that I meant to see them again, but it seems it's better not."

It was the valet who wept.

Now there were new sounds below: the guard was being doubled, not changed. Towards half-past eight words of command and the noise of hoofs became audible, as detachments of horse came trampling into the inner courtyard. "Seems as if they're coming now," the King said. Five minutes later the door shook, under heavy knocking, and Louis opened to his bourreaux himself. There stood Santerre, "Commandant-Général de la Garde Nationale," in his plumed hat, epaulets, and crescent of gold braid; with him entered ten gendarmes and several "Commissaires de la Commune"-a vintner, a clockmaker, a tailor, a stone-cutter, a hosier, an engraver, an architect, a pavior, and one "Jean Baptiste Baudrais, homme de lettres." To him the King handed his will. "Take charge of it,-be kind to my family-protect my valet here, and the rest of my servants. No, Cléry, I shan't want it"-he rejected his overcoat. "Give me my hat."

It was his old three-cornered hat, that he was wearing when he left the Palace of the Tuileries nearly five months before, at much the same hour; it was the big, soft hat for a head never capable of sustaining a crown. Staunch Swiss and gallant French gentlemen were fighting and falling for him then, that Tenth of August, but he had deserted, there had been "no stroke in him." Stolidly he had deserted; "Marchons," he had said to the Queen, with a slinking,

side-long look; and those about to die for him, gazing through the western windows of the Palace, could see him "placidly hold on his way" across the gardens, the little Dauphin "sportfully kicking the fallen leaves." So now, this January morning, when every leaf is dead, Louis claps on that old hat and mutters "Marchons" again. There had been just an instant of anger in him, he had stamped his foot; but, "Allons, partons!" he says, and goes out almost hastily, forgetting to ask for his gloves; there is no longer a Gentleman of the Wardrobe near him, to hand them to him with an almost Oriental congee.

Twice as he crossed the inner courtyard he turned, to lift his eyes towards the brutal mass of the Temple tower, but the brown gloom of the air prevented seeing or being seen. The poignancy of that minute, even to him! For there, within those lofty walls, at the third story, dwelt his wife and children and sister-"tout ce qu'il avait de plus cher en ce bas monde" Edgeworth wrote in his "Relation," and he was seen to make "un mouvement convulsif comme pour rappeler sa fermeté" ("Semaines Parisiennes," vol. i. 371). One's eye dims a little at that-the mind of the efficient can soften a little towards his ineptitude; it was not his choice to be born a Bourbon, decadent and incompetent; it was not his fault that he was no Goethe, no Washington, no Pitt. Watch him go faltering through the outer courtyard, with that pottering, indecisive step of his; see how he knocks his head as he climbs into the "carrosse à quatre places et à quatre roues, nuance vert bouteille." The Abbé follows him in, two gendarmes take the opposite seats, the blinds are drawn down, and away through the wet brownness the carriage rolls, escorted by "twelve hundred picked men."

We will follow him awhile, and then avert the eyes; the French Revolution had to be, but it is still no pleasant sight. Eighty thousand citoyens armed with muskets and pikes kept the route and prevented rescue or escape. All shops were shut; with "horrible menaces" the escort pointed their weapons towards any door or window that stood ajar. By the Rue du Temple, and what is now the Rue Réaumur, the carriage went; past the Porte St. Martin, the boulevard way, to the Porte St. Denis; past the end of the Rue de Richelieu to the Rue St. Honoré, and thus to the Place de la Révolutionthe Place de la Concorde of to-day.

There is a famous etching by Méryon, which shows the Palais-Bourbon, the obelisk, and the colonnade of the Ministère de la Marine, with visionary beings descending through the air upon machines which resemble monoplanes and airships; it is as though the artist foresaw the aerial warfare which must one day antiquate all admiralties and sea-borne vessels of war. Already French Admiralty is decaying again, though the Ministère de la Marine still stands. Place yourself with that building to your left, your face towards the Tuileries gardens, your back to the ChampsElysées; at about fifteen paces to the rear and left of the obelisk you will occupy part of the exact site upon which the King's scaffold stood. There was then no obelisk in view, but a statue of Louis XIV. instead. The dying King's eye fell on that, and he remembered. We are all of "throwbacks," in all of us it is "les morts qui parlent," and the thought of what Bourbons had been strung a moribund Bourbon up to the pitch. gazed upon the ugly instrument of his death, upon the waiting crowds, and then at the strutting figure of his ancestor; he stiffened into French majesty, he became Royal for his last

us

He

Nothing common did, or mean
Upon that memorable scene.

To this dull, slow, bourgeois King, true cousin of Louis Philippe, it was given The Cornhill Magazine.

There is just that sunburst; but now the fog and horror close in again. Every martyring is a blunder; had this poor stupid man been allowed to live on, in prison, there might have been no Terror, no Bonaparte, no Trafalgar and death of French admiralty, no "Hundred Days," no Waterloo, no decay of France, no Louis Napoleon, no Sedan.

It is a difficult matter for an unpractised person to isolate for useful analysis any one of the many component parts of what is called The Social Problem; even for the professed student of some particular branch of Reform, I imagine that it must frequently be a temptation to enter as a propagandist other fields than those in which his special qualifications entitle him to a hearing. This tendency to stray from the subject is doubtless due to the inherent complexity of most of the problems that are to-day so insistently demanding a solution, a complexity resulting from the overlapping of great tracts of human experience and activity, the apparent impossibility of assigning permanent and recognizable frontiers to the separate provinces of politics, of economics, of aesthetics, of morals. Modern civilization has, so far, signally failed to replace the medieval synthesis it has destroyed with one that is capable of supplying a larger sanction than that of local custom or individual opinion, and that is the reason why so many discussions remain sterile, so many excellent enterprises barren of results; for how can there be any effective solidarity among the advocates of reform

LIVING AGE. VOL. LIV. 2823

in the body politic when their agreement upon the precise form indispensable to the perfect commonwealth is entirely unsupported by any community of opinion on the subject of the perfect man. Neither unwilling nor unable to come to a decision upon this subject, but unimpressed with its fundamental importance; a very large number among the friends of progress and order are constantly finding themselves in the position of being obliged to content themselves with the furtherance of projects but remotely connected with the realization of their heart's desire. Quite large bodies of reformers are frequently found to be united by the slender tie of a single common factor in the most diverse individual programmes; all subscribing with 'serious inward misgivings to the official formula, in the belief that in the progress of the common undertaking the character of the ninety-nine doubtful ingredients is more or less guaranteed by that of the approved hundredth. It is to this cause that I attribute the general atmosphere of disheartenment and disillusion in which so many reformers are working to-day; an atmosphere which will hardly be come revitalized until the fundamental