I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object
of the triumph, has borne that day (one is interested that beings made
for suffering should suffer well) and that she bears all the
succeeding days, that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and
her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting
adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated
wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and
race, and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her
piety and her courage; that like her she has lofty sentiments; that
she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last
extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace, and that if
she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France,
then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this
orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw
her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated
sphere she just began to move in--glittering like the morning star,
full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a
heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and
that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to
those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever
be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such
disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of
men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have
leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her
with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters,
economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is
extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous
loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified
obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in
servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace
of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of
principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound,
which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled
whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by
losing all its grossness.