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We see him as president of the Jacobin Club, president of the Convention, and member of the Committee of Public Safety; he drags the Girondists to the scaffold: he drags the queen thither, and his former patron, Danton, said of him, `Billaud has a dagger under his tongue. He approves of the cannonades at Lyons, the drownings at Nantes, the massacres at Arras; he organises the pitiless commission of Orange; he is concerned in the laws of Prairial; he eggs on Fouquier-Tinville; on all decrees of death is his name, often the first; he signs before his colleagues; he is without pity, without emotion, without enthusiasm; when others are frightened, hesitate, and draw back, he goes his way, speaking in turgid sentences, `shaking his lion's mane' for to make his cold and impassive face more in harmony with the exuberance that surrounds him he now decks himself in a yellow wig which would make one laugh were it on any but the sinister head of Billaud-Varenne.

The Girondists, after the 10th of August, were, between the middle class and the multitude, what the monarchists, or the Mounier and Necker party, had been after the 24th of July, between the privileged classes and the bourgeoisie. The Mountain, on the contrary, desired a republic of the people.

Antoine rose, menaced the deputies, and demanded with loud cries the liberation of the persecuted patriots. But the Convention was no longer such as it had been, when similar means were employed too successfully against the Girondists. Its spirit was roused. Its strength had been proved. Military means were at its command.

From this day she conceived the idea of rescuing the king from the power of the Jacobins and Girondists of carrying him off through the agency of M. de Narbonne and the constitutionalists of re-seating him on the throne of crushing the extreme parties, and establishing her ideal government a liberal aristocracy.

They were the true leaders of the new movement about to take place by the means of the lower class of society against the middle class, to which the Girondists belonged by their habits and position. A division arose from that day between those who only wished to suppress the court in the existing order of things, and those who wished to introduce the multitude.

It was the commencement of pacification between those who wished for a republic against the royalists, and a practicable constitution, in opposition to the revolutionists. At this period all measures against the federalists were rescinded, and the Girondists assumed the lead of the republican counter- revolution.

The secret motive was to intimidate the Parisian national guard, to revive the energy of the faubourgs, and to be the vanguard of that camp of 20,000 men which the Girondists had made the Assembly vote, in order at the same time to control the Feuillants, the Jacobins, the king, and the Assembly itself, with an army from the departments wholly composed of their creatures.

The glory would also all redound to the Jacobins, for it would not be difficult to convince the multitude that the Girondists merely submitted to a measure which they were unable to resist. Should the Girondists, on the other hand, true to their instinctive abhorrence of these deeds of blood, dare to vote against the death of the king, they would be ruined irretrievably.

The rumbling of the wheels of heavy artillery, the flash of powder, with the frequent report of firearms, and the uproar and the clamor of countless voices, were fearful omens of a day to dawn in blacker darkness than the night. The Girondists had recently been called in the journals and inflammatory speeches of their adversaries the Rolandists.

The Girondists become conservative, and attempt to stay the progress of further excesses, all to no purpose, for the King himself is now impeached, and the Jacobins control everything. The King is led to the bar of the Convention. He is condemned by a majority only of one, and immured in the Temple. On the 20th of January, 1793, he was condemned, and the next day he mounted the scaffold.