Such was the law by which the Reign of Terror was
organized and rendered possible.
At this time the Girondists were lying in prison, awaiting their trial
and their certain doom. Marie Antoinette had been removed from the
Temple to the Conciergerie, and her trial was in a day or two about to
commence. Her fate was already fixed, and had only to be pronounced.
Danton had retired from Paris to his own province, sick with the
shedding of so much blood, jealous of the pre-eminence which Robespierre
had assumed; watching his opportunity to return, that he might sell the
republic to the royalists; equally eager, let us believe, to save his
country as to make his fortune, but destined to return, only that he
also might bend his neck beneath the monster guillotine. Marat, the
foulest birth of the revolution, whose licentious heat generated venom
and rascality, as a dunghill out of its own filth produces adders'
eggs--Marat was no more. Carnot, whose genius for war enabled the French
nation, amidst all its poverty and intestine contests, even in the pangs
and throes of that labour in which it strove to bring forth a
constitution, to repulse the forces of the allied nations, and prepare
the way for future conquests, was a member of the all-powerful
Committee, and we cannot suppose that he acted under the dictation of
Robespierre; but if he did not do so, at any rate he did not interfere
with him.
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