Madame, behold yourself, then, the wife of a minister, and in fact more of a minister than your husband. Your ambitious projects, which have been treated as chimerical, are now realized. You have a cortège like Marie Antoinette. Men seek the favor of a smile, a word, from you. They court, they solicit, they fear you. The monarchy, which you detest, is at last obliged to reckon with you and your friends. Your beauty, your talent, and your eloquence are boasted of. Your name is in every mouth. You are powerful, you are celebrated. Well! you will find out for yourself what bitterness there is at the bottom of this cup of pride which has tempted your lips so long. You will learn at your own expense that renown does not produce happiness, and that, for a woman, twilight is better than the full glare of day. Yes, you will long for the obscurity which weighed upon you. You will long for the house of your father, the engraver, on the Quai des Orfèvres. You will dream of the sunsets which affected you, and of the monotonous but peaceful succession of your days. You, the deist, the female philosopher, will recall with regret the cloisters where in your adolescence you tasted the peace of the elect. In the time of your supreme trial Buzot's miniature will not console you; it is not his image you should cover with your { 71} kisses. No; that miniature is not the viaticum for eternity. What you will need is the crucifix, and you respect the crucifix no longer. And yet your imagination will evoke the mystic cloister, with its altars decked with flowers, its painted windows, its penetrating and ineffable poesy. And in thought, also, you will see the country once more, the harvest time, the month of the vintage, the poor who come to the door asking for bread and who go away with blessings on their lips and gratitude in their hearts. Why have you quitted these honest people? What have you come to do in the midst of these ferocious Jacobins, who flatter you to-day and will assassinate you to-morrow? Do you fancy that Marie Antoinette is the only woman who will be insulted, calumniated, and betrayed? Why do you seat at your hospitable table this livid-faced Robespierre, who to-day, perhaps, will address you a madrigal, and to-morrow send you to the scaffold? You will pay very dear for these false and artificial joys, these gusts of commonplace vanity, this pride of a parvenu, and the pleasure of presiding for a few evenings at the dinners given to the Minister of the Interior in Calonne's dining-room. The Legislative Assembly, the Jacobin Club, the journals and the ministry, the souvenirs of Plutarch and the parodies of Jean-Jacques, the noisy crowd of flatterers who are the courtiers of demagogues as they would have been the courtiers of kings, these adulators who are going to change into executioners,--all are vanity! Poor { 72} woman, whose power will be so ephemeral, why do you make yourself a persecutor? You will so soon be persecuted. Why labor so relentlessly to shake the foundations of a throne that will bury you beneath its ruins?