It is very evident from Madame Roland's
memoirs and letters, that these two women felt that they were in actual
collision. It is a strange contrast; the sceptered wife, looking from
her high places with longing and regret over centuries of hereditary
succession, divine right and unquestioned prerogative, calling on her
house of Hapsburg for aid, appealing to the kings of the earth for
assistance in moving back the irreversible march of destiny:--from
another palace the daughter of the people looking not back, but forward,
speaking of kings and monarchies as gone, or soon to go, into tables of
chronology, listening to what the ancient centuries speak from Grecian
and Roman tombs, summoning old philosophies to attest the inalienable
rights of man, looking beyond the mobs of kings and lords to the great
nation-forming people, upon which these float and pass away like the
shadows of purple Summer clouds; and stranger still, the ending of the
contrast in the identification of these typical women in their death,
both going to the same scaffold, discrowned of all their hopes. Of all
the lessons which life has taught to ambition, none are more touching
than when it points to the figures of these women as they are hurried by
the procession in which they moved to a common fate.
The ministry insisted that the king should proclaim war against those
who were threatening invasion, and that he should proceed stringently
against the unpatriotic clergy.
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