the torments that had filled those twenty-six years were being
reawakened. Had nothing been accomplished? Had none of the large
problems been solved? Would the uncertainty never end?

Most of the characters who play a role in this story have searing
memories of those twenty-six years; many of them played a more
or less important role in the events that marked them. And for each
of them the history of those years is a different story--depending
upon background, upbringing, experience, age and sex. Princes
of the blood, members of the clergy, the new aristocracy and official-
dom of the Empire, the upper and the petty nobility and commoners
are moved to decision during this Holy Week by their relation to
those past events.

When the Estates-General convened on May 4, 1789, at the
invitation of King Louis XVI, in order to seek a solution to the
desperate economic crisis which faced the country, there was no
thought in the minds of the men representing the three Estates (the
clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate) of initiating any fundamental
changes. France had been a monarchy for centuries and it seemed in
the natural order of things that it should remain one. But the
Estates-General became transformed on June 17th of that same
year into a National Assembly, which in turn on July 9th assumed
the title of Constituent Assembly. The population of Paris emerged
as a leading political power in the country, captured the Bastille on
July 14th, brought the King and his family by main force from
Versailles to Paris on October 6th. The irreconcilable conflict grew
in intensity and violence over the succeeding months, with an in-
creasing number of the privileged emigrating en masse to neighboring
countries, the King himself with Marie-Antoinette and their children
attempting to escape on the night of June 20, 1791, and being over-
taken at Varennes and brought back to Paris as prisoners. The crisis
deepened and the Revolution was progressively threatened by dis-
sension within and by invading armies from abroad. There followed
the execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, in the square
which is now the Place de la Concorde, the Reign of Terror, the
setting up of the Committee of Public Safety, the creation of
popular armies which beat off the enemy in successive battles of
which Valmy, on September 20, 1792, under Dumouriez and
Kellerman, was the first decisive one; until a young general, Napoleon
Bonaparte, gradually emerged as a military genius and a national
hero, and was acclaimed when he returned from Egypt and landed in
Fréjus on October 8, 1799. This whole history of ten years of

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