Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people.  Louis XVI did not die in his bed, consequently history is very gentle with him; she is charitable toward his failings, and she finds in him high virtues which are not usually considered to be virtues when they are lodged in kings.  She makes him out to be a person with a meek and modest spirit, the heart of a female saint, and a wrong head.  None of these qualities are kingly but the last.  Taken together they make a character which would have fared harshly at the hands of history if its owner had had the ill luck to miss martyrdom.  With the best intentions to do the right thing, he always managed to do the wrong one.  Moreover, nothing could get the female saint out of him.  He knew, well enough, that in national emergencies he must not consider how he ought to act, as a man, but how he ought to act as a king; so he honestly tried to sink the man and be the king—­but it was a failure, he only succeeded in being the female saint.  He was not instant in season, but out of season.  He could not be persuaded to do a thing while it could do any good—­he was iron, he was adamant in his stubbornness then—­but as soon as the thing had reached a point where it would be positively harmful to do it, do it he would, and nothing could stop him.  He did not do it because it would be harmful, but because he hoped it was not yet too late to achieve by it the good which it would have done if applied earlier.  His comprehension was always a train or two behindhand.  If a national toe required amputating, he could not see that it needed anything more than poulticing; when others saw that the mortification had reached the knee, he first perceived that the toe needed cutting off—­so he cut it off; and he severed the leg at the knee when others saw that the disease had reached the thigh.  He was good, and honest, and well meaning, in the matter of chasing national diseases, but he never could overtake one.  As a private man, he would have been lovable; but viewed as a king, he was strictly contemptible.

His was a most unroyal career, but the most pitiable spectacle in it was his sentimental treachery to his Swiss guard on that memorable 10th of August, when he allowed those heroes to be massacred in his cause, and forbade them to shed the “sacred French blood” purporting to be flowing in the veins of the red-capped mob of miscreants that was raging around the palace.  He meant to be kingly, but he was only the female saint once more.  Some of his biographers think that upon this occasion the spirit of Saint Louis had descended upon him.  It must have found pretty cramped quarters.  If Napoleon the First had stood in the shoes of Louis XVI that day, instead of being merely a casual and unknown looker-on, there would be no Lion of Lucerne, now, but there would be a well-stocked Communist graveyard in Paris which would answer just as well to remember the 10th of August by.