courage and her physical courage were equally tried. It was not only that
her own life, and lives far dearer to her than her own, were exposed to
daily and hourly peril, or that to this danger were added repeated
vexations of hopes baffled and trusts betrayed; but these griefs were
largely aggravated by the character and conduct of those nearest to her.
Instead of meeting with counsel and support from her husband and his
brothers, she had to guide and support Louis himself, and even to find him
so incurably weak as to be incapable of being kept in the path of wisdom
by her sagacity, or of deriving vigor from her fortitude; while the
princes were acting in selfish and disloyal opposition to him, and so, in
a great degree, sacrificing him and her to their perverse conceit, if we
may not say to their faithless ambition. She had to think for all, to act
for all, to struggle for all; and to beat up against the conviction that
her thoughts, and actions, and struggles were being balked of their effect
by the very persona for whom she was exerting herself; that she was but
laboring to save those who would not be saved. Yet, throughout that
protracted agony of more than four years she bore herself with an
unswerving righteousness of purpose and an unfaltering fearlessness of
resolution which could not have been exceeded had she been encouraged by
the most constant success. And in the last terrible hours, when the
monsters who had already murdered her husband were preparing the same fate
for herself, she met their hatred and ferocity with a loftiness of spirit
which even hopelessness could not subdue. Long before, she had declared
that she had learned, from the example of her mother, not to fear death;
and she showed that this was no empty boast when she rose in the last
scenes of her life as much even above her earlier displays of courage and
magnanimity as she also rose above the utmost malice of her vile enemies.

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