destiny; and, weary of her domestic wrangles, and resolved to end them
forever, she took her little daughter, Hortense, then scarcely four
years old, and with her sailed away from France, to seek beyond the
ocean and in her mother's arms the new happiness of undisturbed
tranquillity.

But, at that juncture, tranquillity had fled the world. The mutterings
and moanings of the impending tempest could be heard on all sides. A
subterranean rumbling was audible throughout all lands; a dull
thundering and outcry, as though the solid earth were about to change
into one vast volcano--one measureless crater--that would dash to atoms,
and entomb, with its blazing lava-streams and fiery cinder-showers, the
happiness and peace of all humanity. And, finally, this terrific crater
did, indeed, open and hurl destruction and death on all sides, over the
whole world, uprooting, with demoniac fury, entire races and nations,
and silencing the merry laugh and harmless jest with the overpowering
echoes of its awful voice!

This volcano was the revolution. In France, the first and most fearful
explosion of this terrific crater occurred, but the whole world shook
and heaved with it, and, on all sides, the furious masses from beneath
overflowed on the surface, seeking to reverse the order of things and
place the lowest where the highest had been. Even away in Martinique
this social earthquake was felt, which had already, in France, flung out
the bloody guillotine from its relentless crater. This guillotine had
become the altar of the so-called enfranchisement of nations, and upon
this altar the intoxicated, unthinking masses offered up to their new
idol those who, until then, had been their lords and masters, and by
whose death they now believed that they could purchase freedom
for evermore.