Who can look on this heroic woman without astonishment at the power of
endurance that has enabled her to live on under such trials? Martyr is
written in legible characters on that brow, and on those lips; and her
attempt to smile made me more sad than the tears of a mourner would
have done, because it revealed "a grief too deep for tears."

Must she not tremble for the future, if not for the present, among a
people so versatile as those among whom she is now thrown? And can she
look from the windows of the palace she has been recalled to inhabit,
without seeing the spot where the fearful guillotine was reared that
made her an orphan?

The very plaudits that now rend the skies for her uncle must remind her
of the shouts that followed her father to the scaffold: no wonder,
then, that she grows pale as she hears them; and that the memory of the
terrible past, written in characters of blood, gives a sombre hue to
the present and to the future.

The sight of her, too, must awaken disagreeable recollections in those
over whom her husband may be soon called to reign, for the history of
the crimes of the Revolution is stamped on her face, whose pallid lint
and rigid muscles tell of the horror and affliction imprinted on her
youth; the reminiscence of which cannot be pleasant to them.

The French not only love their country passionately, but are
inordinately proud of it; hence, aught that reminds them of its
sins--and cruelty is one of a deep dye--must be humiliating to them; so
that the presence of the Duchesse d'Angoulême cannot be flattering to
their _amor patriæ_ or _amour propre_. I thought of all this to-day, as
I looked on the face of Madame la Dauphine; and breathed a hope that