One of the finest of these poems of the Revolution is the oldest, written in memory of a little company of innocent young girls who, under the Reign of Terror, were executed after a long imprisonment without being brought to trial, on the vague and incorrect suspicion that they had testified pleasure when the Prussians entered their town (_Les vierges de Verdun_). Hugo paints the tribunal of the Convention blacker than is necessary, by crediting the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, with impure designs upon his victims and putting insulting proposals into his mouth; but even without the addition of unhistorical incidents, the sentence of these girls was so shameful, their fate so tragic, and their behaviour so beautiful and dignified, that they well deserved a poetic monument, even a better one than Hugo raised to them.[2]
The poet's pathos is entirely justifiable in cases like this, where the Revolution showed its dark and unjust side in its dealings with youth and innocence, but it becomes grating and false as soon as his dogmas come into play. His tone in writing of the monarchy and the glories of royalty is positively insufferable. In the Ode to Louis XVIII. God calls upon the seraphs, the prophets, and the archangels to do obeisance to the newly arrived heir to the throne: "Courbez-vous, c'est un Roi." And not content with this, the Deity Himself calls him by his title, not his name: "O Roi!" and reminds him that _God's own Son was, like him, a king with a crown of thorns_. In the poem on the occasion of the baptism of the Comte de Chambord, the language is even stronger: "God has given us one of His angels, _as He gave us His Son in the days of old_." We are reminded that the water of the river Jordan (brought home by Chateaubriand) in which the child has been baptized is the same in which Jesus was baptized; it is the will of Heaven, we are told, "that the reassured world should, even by the very water used for his baptism, recognise a _Saviour_." In _La Vision_ the eighteenth century is summoned before the judgment-seat of God, and there accused of having in the pride of its knowledge mocked at the dogmas which are the support of the law and of morality. It timidly expresses the hope that the future will view its actions in a more favourable light, but it is mercilessly condemned; the "guilty century" is plunged into the abyss, pursued as it falls by the inexorable voice of the judge.