rought in a new
constitution which was finally adopted and decreed (June 24, 1793). Of
this, Sieyes said privately, that it was 'a bad table of contents.'
Condorcet denounced it publicly, and, with a courage hardly excelled, he
declared in so many words that the arrest of the Girondins had destroyed
the integrity of the national representation. The Bill he handled with a
severity that inflicted the keenest smarts on the self-love of its
designers. A few days later, the Capucin Chabot, one of those weak and
excitable natures that in ordinary times divert men by the intensity,
multiplicity, and brevity of their enthusiasms, but to whom the fiercer
air of such an event as the Revolution is a real poison, rose and in the
name of the Committee of General Security called the attention of the
Chamber to what he styled a sequel of the Girondist Brissot. This was no
more nor less than Condorcet's document criticising the new
constitution. 'This man,' said Chabot, 'has sought to raise the
department of the Aisne against you, imagining that, because he has
happened to sit by the side of a handful of _savants_ of the Academy,
it is his duty to give laws to the French Republic.'[38] So a decree
was passed putting Condorcet under arrest. His name was included in the
list of those who were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the
Third of October for conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of
the Republic. He was condemned in his absence, and declared to be _hors
la loi_.

This, then, was the calamitous close of his aspirations from boyhood
upwards to be permitted to partake in doing something for the common
weal. He had still the work to perform by which posterity will best
remember his name, though only a few months intervened between his
flight and his most cruel end. When the decree against him was enacted
he fled. Friends found a refuge for him in the house of a Madame Vernet,
a widow in moderate circumstances, who let lodgings to students, and one
of those beneficent characters that show us how high humanity can reach.
'Is he an honest and virtuous man?' she asked; 'in that case let him
come, and lose not a moment. Even while we talk he may be seized.' The
same night Condorcet intrusted his life to her keeping, and for nine
months he remained in hiding under her roof. When he heard of the
execution of the Girondins condemned on the same day with himself, he
perceived the risk to which he was subjecting his protectr