Philip Egalite, the Duke of Orleans, was to meet his Nemesis also.  Brought a prisoner to that grim resting-place, he occupied the adjoining cell to that which had been the queen’s, and, it is said, had assigned to him the wretched cot she no longer needed.  His desperate game had failed.  No elevation would come to him out of the chaos of crime, and the reward for scheming and voting for the death of his cousin, the king, would be a scaffold, not a throne.  His name had been upon the list of the proscribed for some time; but the end was precipitated by an act of his young son, Louis Philippe, then Duke de Chartres, and aide-de-camp to Dumouriez, who was defending the frontier from an invasion of Austrian troops.  After the execution of the queen, Dumouriez refused longer to defend France from an invasion the purpose of which was to make such horrors impossible.  He laid down his command, and, with his aide, Louis Philippe, joined the colony of exiles in Belgium, while the Austrian troops were in full march upon Paris from Verdun.

This was treason—­whether justifiable or not this is not the place to discuss.

Philip Egalite knew that he no longer had the confidence of the leaders, and that they also knew that he was an aristocrat in disguise.  So when this defection of Dumouriez came, and was shared by his own son, he tried to get out of the country.  He was arrested at Marseilles, brought to the Conciergerie, that half-way house to the scaffold, and was soon following in the footsteps of his king and queen, through the Rue St. Honore, passing his own Palais Royal on his way to the Place de la Revolution.

The Revolution, beginning with a patriotic assembly, in a measure sane, had made a rapid descent, first falling apart into Girondist and Jacobin, moderate and extremist, the Girondist with a shudder consenting to the execution of the king.  Then, the power passing to a so-called “Committee of Public Safety” and a Triumvirate, in order to sweep away the obstructive Girondist; and then an untrammelled Terror, in the hands of three, and, finally, one.  Such had been its mad course.  But with the death of the king and queen, the madness had reached its height, and a revulsion of feeling set in.  There was a surfeit of blood, and an awakening sense of horror, which turned upon the instigators.  Danton fell, and finally, when amid cries of “Death to the tyrant!” Robespierre was dragged wounded and shivering to the fate he had brought upon so many thousands, the drama which had opened at the Bastille was fittingly closed.

The great battle for human liberty had been fought and won.  Religious freedom and political freedom were identical in principle.  The right of the human conscience, proclaimed by Luther in 1517, had in 1793 only expanded into the large conception of all the inherent rights of the individual.