t
made terms with the agents who were attracted by the report of his
unlimited credit, and he spent his doubloons in a frantic attempt at
rescue as the prisoner passed, at a foot pace, along the Boulevard. An
equivocal adventurer, the Baron de Batz, who helped to organise the
rising of Vendemiaire, which only failed because it encountered
Bonaparte, had undertaken to break the line, with four or five
hundred men. They were to make a rush from a side street. But every
street was patrolled and every point was guarded as the coach went by
carrying the prisoner. De Batz was true to the rendezvous, and stood
up waving a sword and crying, "Follow me and save the king!" It was
without effect; he vanished in the crowd; one companion was taken and
guillotined, but the police were able to report that no incident had
occurred on the way.

Not the royalists but the king served the royal cause on that 21st of
January. Unequal to his duties on the throne, he found, in prison and
on the scaffold, a part worthy of the better qualities of his race,
justifying the words of Louis Blanc, "None but the dead come back." To
absolve him is impossible, for we know, better than his persecutors,
how he intrigued to recover uncontrolled authority by bringing havoc
and devastation upon the people over whom he reigned. The crowning
tragedy is not that which Paris witnessed, when Santerre raised his
sword, commanding the drums to beat, which had been silenced by the
first word of the dying speech; it is that Lewis XVI. met his fate
with inward complacency, unconscious of guilt, blind to the
opportunities he had wasted and the misery he had caused, and died a
penitent Christian but an unrepentant king.

XVII

THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE

The Constitution of 1791 had failed because it carried the division of
powers and the reaction against monarchical centralisation so far as
to paralyse the executive. Until the day when a new system should be
organised, a series of revolutionary measures were adopted, and by
these the Convention governed to the end. Immediately after the death
of Lewis XVI. they began to send out representatives with arbitrary
powers to the departments. The revolutionary tribunal was appointed in
March to judge political cases without appeal; and the Secret
Committee of Public Safety in April, on the defeat and defection of
Dumouriez. All this time, the Girondins had the majority. The issue of
the king's trial had been disas