les dates connues de l’histoire demontrent l’absurdite, avoit eu des partisans en France—­elle tendoit a avilir la maison regnante, et a persuader au peuple que le trone n’appartient pas aux descendans de Louis XIV. prince furtivement sutstitue, mais a la posterite du second fils de Louis XIII. qui est la tige de la branche d’Orleans, et qui est reconnue comme descendant legitimement, et sans objection, du Roi Louis XIII.”

     —­Nouvelles Considerations sur la Masque de Fer, Memoirs de
     Richelieu.

“This ridiculous opinion, the absurdity of which is demonstrated by historical dates, had not been without its partizans in France.—­It tended to degrade the reigning family, and to make the people believe that the throne did not of right belong to the descendants of Louis XIV. (a prince surreptitiously intruded) but to the posterity of the second son of Louis XIII. from whom is derived the branch of Orleans, and who was, without dispute, the legitimate and unobjectionable offspring of Louis XIII.”

     —­New Considerations on the Iron Mask.—­Memoirs of the Duc de
     Richelieu.

The author of the above Memoirs adds, that after the taking of the Bastille, new attempts were made to propagate this opinion, and that he himself had refuted it to many people, by producing original letters and papers, sufficiently demonstrative of its absurdity.

—­He might hope, by popularity, to supersede the children of the Count d’Artois, who was hated; but an immediate heir to the Crown could be removed only by throwing suspicions on his legitimacy.  These pretensions, it is true, were so absurd, and even incredible, that had they been urged at the time, no inference in the Queen’s favour would have been admitted from them; but as the existence of such projects, however absurd and iniquitous, has since been demonstrated, one may now, with great appearance of reason, allow them some weight in her justification.

The affair of the necklace was of infinite disservice to the Queen’s reputation; yet it is remarkable, that the most furious of the Jacobins are silent on this head as far as it regarded her, and always mention the Cardinal de Rohan in terms that suppose him to be the culpable party:  but, “whatever her faults, her woes deserve compassion;” and perhaps the moralist, who is not too severe, may find some excuse for a Princess, who, at the age of sixteen, possibly without one real friend or disinterested adviser, became the unrestrained idol of the most licentious Court in Europe.  Even her enemies do not pretend that her fate was so much a merited punishment as a political measure:  they alledge, that while her life was yet spared, the valour of their troops was checked by the possibility of negotiation; and that being no more, neither the people nor armies expecting any thing but execration or revenge, they will be more ready to proceed to the most desperate extremities.—­This you will think a barbarous sort of policy, and considering it as national, it appears no less absurd than barbarous; but for the Convention, whose views perhaps extend little farther than to saving their heads, peculating, and receiving their eighteen livres a day, such measures, and such a principle of action, are neither unwise nor unaccountable:  “for the wisdom of civilized nations is not their wisdom, nor the ways of civilized people their ways."*—­