wed them to make all their preparations without appearing to
see them, and legalised them whenever they were completed.

II.

His early connection with Brissot had drawn him towards Madame Roland.
The ministry of Roland, Claviere, and Servan obeyed him more than even
the king, he was present at all their consultations, and although their
fall did not involve him, it wrested the executive power from his grasp.
The expelled Girondists had no need to infuse their thirst of vengeance
into the mind of Petion. Unable any longer to conspire legally against
the king, with his ministers, he yet could conspire with the factions
against the Tuileries. The national guards, the people, the Jacobins,
the faubourgs, the whole city, were in his hands; thus he could give
sedition to the Girondists to aid this party to regain the ministry; and
he gave it them with all the hazards--all the crimes that sedition
carries with it. Amongst these hazards was the assassination of the king
and his family: this event was beforehand accepted by those who provoked
the assembly of the populace, and their invasion of the king's palace.
Girondists, Orleanists, Republicans, Anarchists, none of these parties
perhaps actually meditated this crime, but they looked upon it as an
eventuality of their fortune. Petion, who doubtless did not desire it,
at least risked it; and if his intention was innocent, his temerity was
a murder. What distance was there between the steel of twenty thousand
pikes and the heart of Louis XVI.? Petion did not betray the lives of
the king, the queen, and the children, but he placed them at stake. The
constitutional guard of the king had been ignominiously disbanded by the
Girondists; the Duc de Brissac, its commander, was sent to the high
court of Orleans, for imaginary conspiracies,--his only conspiracy was
his honour; and he had sworn to die bravely in defence of his master and
his friend. He could have escaped, but though even the king advised him
to fly, he refused. "If I fly," replied he, to the king's entreaties,
"it will be said that I am guilty, and that you are my accomplice; my
flight will accuse you: I prefer to die." He left Paris for the national
court of Orleans: he was not tried, but massacred at Versailles, on the
6th of September, and his head with its white hairs was planted on one
of the palisades of the palace gates, as if in atrocious mockery of
that chivalrous honour that even in death guarded the gate of