About three in the morning, the dissident Armed-Forces have met.  Henriot’s Armed Force stood ranked in the Place de Greve; and now Barras’s, which he has recruited, arrives there; and they front each other, cannon bristling against cannon.  Citoyens! cries the voice of Discretion, loudly enough, Before coming to bloodshed, to endless civil-war, hear the Convention Decree read:  ’Robespierre and all rebels Out of Law!’—­Out of Law?  There is terror in the sound:  unarmed Citoyens disperse rapidly home; Municipal Cannoneers range themselves on the Convention side, with shouting.  At which shout, Henriot descends from his upper room, far gone in drink as some say; finds his Place de Greve empty; the cannons’ mouth turned towards him; and, on the whole,—­that it is now the catastrophe!

Stumbling in again, the wretched drunk-sobered Henriot announces:  “All is lost!” “Miserable! it is thou that hast lost it,” cry they:  and fling him, or else he flings himself, out of window:  far enough down; into masonwork and horror of cesspool; not into death but worse.  Augustin Robespierre follows him; with the like fate.  Saint-Just called on Lebas to kill him:  who would not.  Couthon crept under a table; attempting to kill himself; not doing it.—­On entering that Sanhedrim of Insurrection, we find all as good as extinct; undone, ready for seizure.  Robespierre was sitting on a chair, with pistol shot blown through, not his head, but his under jaw; the suicidal hand had failed. (Meda. p. 384.) Meda asserts that it was he who, with infinite courage, though in a lefthanded manner, shot Robespierre.  Meda got promoted for his services of this night; and died General and Baron.  Few credited Meda (in what was otherwise incredible.) With prompt zeal, not without trouble, we gather these wretched Conspirators; fish up even Henriot and Augustin, bleeding and foul; pack them all, rudely enough, into carts; and shall, before sunrise, have them safe under lock and key.  Amid shoutings and embracings.

Robespierre lay in an anteroom of the Convention Hall, while his Prison-escort was getting ready; the mangled jaw bound up rudely with bloody linen:  a spectacle to men.  He lies stretched on a table, a deal-box his pillow; the sheath of the pistol is still clenched convulsively in his hand.  Men bully him, insult him:  his eyes still indicate intelligence; he speaks no word.  ’He had on the sky-blue coat he had got made for the Feast of the Etre Supreme’—­O reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that?  His trousers were nankeen; the stockings had fallen down over the ankles.  He spake no word more in this world.

And so, at six in the morning, a victorious Convention adjourns.  Report flies over Paris as on golden wings; penetrates the Prisons; irradiates the faces of those that were ready to perish:  turnkeys and moutons, fallen from their high estate, look mute and blue.  It is the 28th day of July, called 10th of Thermidor, year 1794.