But neither the gracious protection of consular favour, nor the splendour of unrivalled abilities, can restore their polluted possessor, to the affections and endearments of social intercourse. Humanity has drawn a _sable circle_ round him. He leads the life of a proscribed exile, in the very centre of the gayest city in Europe. In the gloomy shade of unchosen seclusion, he passes his ungladdened hours, in the hope of covering his guilt with his glory, and of presenting to posterity, by the energies of his unequalled genius, some atonement for the havoc, and ruin of that political hurricane, of which he directed the fury, and befriended the desolations, against every contemporary object that nature had endeared, and virtue consecrated.
After leaving the gallery of David, I visited la Place de la Concorde. This ill fated spot, from its spaciousness, and beauty of situation, has always been the theatre of the great fêtes of the nation, as well as the scene of its greatest calamities. When the nuptials of the late king and queen were celebrated, the magnificent fireworks, shows, and illuminations which followed, were here displayed. During the exhibition, a numerous banditti, from Normandy, broke in upon the vast assemblage of spectators: owing to the confusion which followed, and the fall of some of the scaffolding, the supporters of which were sawed through by these wretches, the disorder became dreadful, and universal; many were crushed to death, and some hundreds of the people, whilst endeavouring to make their escape, were stabbed, and robbed. The king and queen, as a mark of their deep regret, ordered the dead to be entombed in the new burial ground of l'Église de Madeleine, then erecting at the entrance of the Boulevard des Italiens, in the neighbourhood of the palace, under the immediate inspection and patronage of the sovereign. This building was never finished, and still presents to the eye, a naked pile of lofty walls and columns. Alas! the gloomy auguries which followed this fatal spectacle, were too truly realized. On _that_ spot perished the monarch and his queen, and the flower of the french nobility, and many of the virtuous and enlightened men of France, and in _this_ cemetery, their unhonoured remains were thrown, amidst heaps of headless victims, into promiscuous graves of unslacked lime!