consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to
spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but
to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests,
social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should,
according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the
tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.

Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and the
innermost--the privacy of death--was never allowed to put obstacles in
the way of public action for a public cause. Women might be, and were,
duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a
"right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of
the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear
political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was
guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.




A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY


There is hardly a writer now--of the third class probably not one--who
has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; not
one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference to
the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, the
mosses are said to be full.

But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice of
the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and of the