They told him "that his grandson continued to
carry himself with such insolent opposition in the south, it would be
well if the empress, at the termination of the war, allowed him to
escape with banishment to Siberia." But every reproach thus levelled
at the palatine he found had been bought by some new success of
Thaddeus; and instead of permitting their malignity to intimidate his
age or alarm his affection, he told the officer (who kept guard in
his chambers) that if his grandson were to lose his head for fidelity
to Poland, he should behold him with as proud an eye mounting the
scaffold as entering the streets of Warsaw with her freedom in his
hand. "The only difference would be," continued Sobieski, "that as
the first cannot happen until all virtue be dead in this land, I
should regard his last gasp as the expiring sigh of that virtue
which, by him, had found a triumph even under the axe. But for the
second, it would be joy unutterable to behold the victory of justice
over rapine and violence! But, either way, Thaddeus Sobieski is still
the same--ready to die or ready to live for his country, and equally
worthy of the sacred halo with which posterity would encircle his
name forever."
Indeed, the accounts which arrived from this young soldier, who had
formed a junction with General Kosciusko, were in the highest degree
formidable to the coalesced powers.
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