Strange enough:  it is the same tribune raised in mid-air, where a high Mirabeau, a high Barnave and Aristocrat Lameths once thundered:  whom gradually your Brissots, Guadets, Vergniauds, a hotter style of Patriots in bonnet rouge, did displace; red heat, as one may say, superseding light.  And now your Brissots in turn, and Brissotins, Rolandins, Girondins, are becoming supernumerary; must desert the sittings, or be expelled:  the light of the Mighty Mother is burning not red but blue!—­Provincial Daughter-Societies loudly disapprove these things; loudly demand the swift reinstatement of such eloquent Girondins, the swift ‘erasure of Marat, radiation de Marat.’  The Mother Society, so far as natural reason can predict, seems ruining herself.  Nevertheless she has, at all crises, seemed so; she has a preternatural life in her, and will not ruin.

But, in a fortnight more, this great Question of the Trial, while the fit Committee is assiduously but silently working on it, receives an unexpected stimulus.  Our readers remember poor Louis’s turn for smithwork:  how, in old happier days, a certain Sieur Gamain of Versailles was wont to come over, and instruct him in lock-making;—­often scolding him, they say for his numbness.  By whom, nevertheless, the royal Apprentice had learned something of that craft.  Hapless Apprentice; perfidious Master-Smith!  For now, on this 20th of November 1792, dingy Smith Gamain comes over to the Paris Municipality, over to Minister Roland, with hints that he, Smith Gamain, knows a thing; that, in May last, when traitorous Correspondence was so brisk, he and the royal Apprentice fabricated an ‘Iron Press, Armoire de Fer,’ cunningly inserting the same in a wall of the royal chamber in the Tuileries; invisible under the wainscot; where doubtless it still sticks!  Perfidious Gamain, attended by the proper Authorities, finds the wainscot panel which none else can find; wrenches it up; discloses the Iron Press,—­full of Letters and Papers!  Roland clutches them out; conveys them over in towels to the fit assiduous Committee, which sits hard by.  In towels, we say, and without notarial inventory; an oversight on the part of Roland.

Here, however, are Letters enough:  which disclose to a demonstration the Correspondence of a traitorous self-preserving Court; and this not with Traitors only, but even with Patriots, so-called!  Barnave’s treason, of Correspondence with the Queen, and friendly advice to her, ever since that Varennes Business, is hereby manifest:  how happy that we have him, this Barnave, lying safe in the Prison of Grenoble, since September last, for he had long been suspect!  Talleyrand’s treason, many a man’s treason, if not manifest hereby, is next to it.  Mirabeau’s treason:  wherefore his Bust in the Hall of the Convention ‘is veiled with gauze,’ till we ascertain.  Alas, it is too ascertainable!  His Bust in the Hall of the Jacobins, denounced by Robespierre from the tribune in mid-air, is not veiled,