attempted to shoot himself by discharging a pistol into his mouth, which however only fractured the lower left jaw, and left it hanging down by the flesh and ligaments; but a field-officer in the French army, of the name of Mcda, subsequently claimed the honour of having fired this shot; and he supported his assertion by some plausible facts. Meda-who afterwards rose to be a colonel, and was killed in that rank at the battle of Moskwa-was at this period of the age of 18 or 19, and a private gendarme ; as such he accompanied Leonard Bourdon in his attack on the Robespierrians in the Maison de Ville, and showed so much firmness and courage, that when Bourdon returned to the Convention, to give an account of his success, he brought Meda with him, placed him by his side in the Tribune, stated that he had with his own hand frappé (literally struck, but it probably means wounded or killed) two of the conspirators, and obtained for him the honours of the sitting, honourable mention in the Procès verbal, and a promise of military promotion. The next day there appears an order of the Convention to deliver to Meda a pistol which had been placed on the bar the day before. All this the Procès verbal of the sittings and the report in the Moniteur record. But, on the other hand, it is not stated that one of the two struck by Meda was Robespierre, On the contrary, Bourdon says, that Meda disarmed him of a knife, but does not say that he either struck or shot HIM-a circumstance so transcendently important, that Bourdon could have hardly omitted to state it had it been so. Nor is it said that the pistol delivered to Meda was his own, nor that it was the pistol by which Robespierre was wounded; nor is any reason given why he should have shot Robespierre, whom, if his own account be correct, he might have taken alive. Meda, there can be no doubt, accompanied Bourdon, (Bourdon says that he never quitted him,) and distinguished himself generally; but neither in the Procès verbal, nor in the Moniteur, is there any evidence of his having shot Robespierre; and his own statement is somewhat at variance with Bourdon's, and not very intelligible as to the position in which the alleged shot was fired. This would of itself excite some doubts, but these doubts are much strengthened by the following facts. 1. Barrère, in the official report (made, not like Bourdon's, verbally in the hurry and agitation of the moment, but on the third day, and after the collection and examination of all the facts) states distinctly that Robespierre clumsily wounded himself; 2. The surgeon who dressed the wound made a technical and official report, that it must have been inflicted by the patient himself; and, 3. It is stated, that, as the poor wretch lay mangled on a table at the Hotel de Ville, he supported his broken jaw and endeavoured to absorb the the blood with a woollen pistol-bag, which he had in his left hand. This trifling circumstance, which could hardly have been invented, strongly corroborates the reports of Barrère and the surgeon, and the general opinion. We suppose the truth to have been, that Robespierre drew his pistol from the woollen bag, which he held in his left hand, and on the approach of the gens-d'armes shot himself with the right, and fell-that Meda picked up the pistol and carried it to the Convention, which next day restored it to him as a trophy to which he had the best right. This conjecture seems to reconcile all the facts and all the statements, except only the tardy assertion of Meda himself. Our readers are all aware of the rest of the lingering torture of the wretch's exposure at the Hotel de Ville, and afterwards on that table of the Committee of General Security upon which he had so often signed his more than royal mandates-of his twenty-four hours of agony, fever, insult, and unquenched thirst-of his conveyance in the same cart, along the same tedious transit from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution, which his thousand victims had made-of the halt of the procession before Duplay's house(the scene of whatever quiet moments he had enjoyed since his first appearance in the political world)-where a band of women, his own Furies of the Guillotine, executed a fiendish dance of joy of the brutal executioner tearing the bandages from his shattered head, and twisting the fractured jaw, that it might not interfere with the action of the sacred machine'-and, finally, of his emerging slowly to the surface of the scaffold, more dead than alive, and exhibiting, stained and torn, the same fantastical coat of sky-blue silk in which only six weeks before he had figured, almost on the same spot, in a power surpassing that of monarchs, and for a purpose to which it was impious in a mortal to aspire. We are not of those who look presumptuously for special providences in human misfortunes, but it is impossible to divest the mind of the awful impression which this last scene must excite in such close approximation of time, place, and even garb, with that gaudy day in which the infatuated and audacious vanity of this unhappy man dared-in the face of the awful evidences of nature-to announce that the National Convention recognized a SUPREME BEING. Happy for us to whose present condition much of what we have related bears a fearful analogy-happy for us if we could be taught prudence by such lessons-to see that when a people departs suddenly and violently from its ancient ways, there is no limit to error, extravagance, crime, and misery-that under the frenzy of a revolution, the original dispositions and intentions of no man can be depended on-that by vanity, ambition, and above all, cowardice cowardice (the main-springs of revolution), those, who under happier circumstances might have been innocent, respectable, amiable, and useful, become perverted, depraved, demonized-abhorred of God and man-the scourges of their kind, and the tormentors and executioners of themselves! To such deplorable apostacy does the infirmity of our nature expose us, that none of our most respectable moral reformersnone of our humane mitigators of the criminal code-none of our purest advocates of civil and religious liberty, can be more zealous, more disinterested, nor probably more sagacious and sincere, than were MARAT and ROBESPIERRE, when they commenced their innovating career with these benevolent speculations. Their earlier writings inculcate nothing but morality, humanity, and rational liberty; but the intoxicating whirl of revolutionary success, and the giddy heights of revolutionary peril, turned their heads, and transformed them from philosophers and philanthropists—into mad men and monsters! And let us not-as a nation-be so presumptuous as to say, that if the flood-gates are once opened the torrent will be less violent or less bloody. England has never yet been tried in a radical revolution: we hope-but can we be assured?—that she would bear such an intoxication better than the once gay and good-natured people of France. If the miseries of that people were a divine chastisement, what claim have we to plead for a lighter punishment?—if they were the mere work of human frailty and crime, what reason have we to expect that we shall be less guilty? Let us, then, endeavour to curb the curiosity of innovation-to restrain the frenzy of presumption to humble the arrogance of self-confidence-to control by constitutional checks the extravagances of political ambition and popular fury-and to endeavour to maintain--through our ancient and approved institutions-the respect and reverence of our people for their laws, their king, their church, and their God. |