History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her
awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not
forget either those events or the era of this liberal refinement in the
intercourse of mankind. History will record, that on the morning of
the 6th of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of
confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged
security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite,
and troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first
startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her
to save herself by flight--that this was the last proof of fidelity he
could give--that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he
was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his
blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred
strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed from whence this persecuted
woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown
to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and
husband, not secure of his own life for a moment. This king, to say no
more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would
have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people), were
then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in
the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and
strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcases. Thence they were
conducted into the capital of their kingdom. Two had been selected from
the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter, which was made of the
gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king's body-guard. These
two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execution of justice, were
cruelly and publicly dragged to the block, and beheaded in the great
court of the palace. Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the
procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were
slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams,
and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable
abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest
of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the
bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles,
protracted to six hours, they were, under a guard composed of those very
soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged
in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a Bastille for
kings.
Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars? to be commemorated with
grateful thanksgiving? to be offered to the divine humanity with fervent
prayer and enthusiastic ejaculation?--These Theban and Thracian orgies,
acted in France, and applauded only in the Old Jewry, I assure you,
kindle prophetic enthusiasm in the minds but of very few people in this
kingdom: although a saint and apostle, who may have revelations of his
own, and who has so completely vanquished all the mean superstitions of
the heart, may incline to think it pious and decorous to compare it with
the entrance into the world of the Prince of Peace, proclaimed in a holy
temple by a venerable sage, and not long before not worse announced by
the voice of angels to quiet the innocence of shepherds.