uestion of bringing the king,
or "Capet," as he was now termed, to trial was debated in the Convention
as early as the 7th of November, 1792; on the 2d of December, the
Conseil General of the Commune of Paris sent a petition to the
Convention inviting that body to expedite this affair, and asking that
the debate should be on these two questions: "1. Is Louis worthy of
death? 2. Would it be advantageous for the Republic that he should
perish on the scaffold?" By the terms of the constitution, the person of
the king was sacred, and the extreme penalty provided for him was
deposition, but the spirit of the "Terror" was already in the air; the
situation on the frontiers was extremely critical; it was with some
vague idea of defying or of awing the coalition that Danton had
exclaimed in the Assemblee: "Let us throw them, in defiance, the head of
a king!" The execution of the monarch, on the morning of the 21st of
January, 1793, had, on the contrary, the effect of uniting against
France all the sovereigns of Europe.

Around this execution have clustered the usual growth of legends and
invention that supplement the great, trenchant facts of history with an
embroidery to which history does not always condescend. The fine words
which the king's confessor, the Abbe Edgeworth, are supposed to have
addressed to him on the scaffold: "Son of Saint-Louis, ascend to
heaven!" were invented on the day of the execution by a journalist named
Charles His. The picturesque story of a secret midnight mass, celebrated
every year on the anniversary of the execution, at the instigation and
at the expense of the executioner Sanson, is equally devoid of
foundation. It first appeared in the preface of a work published in
1830, under the title of _Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de la
Revolution francaise_, by SANSON, _executeur des arrets criminels_. The
preface was written by Balzac, the work itself by a certain Lheritier,
and Balzac reproduced the story with appropriate embellishments in his
_Une Messe en 1793_, and later in the _Episode sous la Terreur_. One of
the nuns who, in the first account, appeared as Mlle. de Charost here
becomes the Mlle. de Langeais who figures so picturesquely and
improbably in several of his romances. In the _Biographie universelle_,
Michaud relates that Sanson, in his will, left directions to have a
commemorative mass celebrated every year on the 21st of January; that he
was so affected by the execution of the king