Nay there is one death-doer, of the ancient Meot sort, who, with effort, has done even less and worse:  slain a Deputy, and set all the Patriotism of Paris on edge!  It was five on Saturday evening when Lepelletier St. Fargeau, having given his vote, No Delay, ran over to Fevrier’s in the Palais Royal to snatch a morsel of dinner.  He had dined, and was paying.  A thickset man ‘with black hair and blue beard,’ in a loose kind of frock, stept up to him; it was, as Fevrier and the bystanders bethought them, one Paris of the old King’s-Guard.  “Are you Lepelletier?” asks he.—­“Yes.”—­“You voted in the King’s Business?”—­“I voted Death.”—­“Scelerat, take that!” cries Paris, flashing out a sabre from under his frock, and plunging it deep in Lepelletier’s side.  Fevrier clutches him; but he breaks off; is gone.

The voter Lepelletier lies dead; he has expired in great pain, at one in the morning;—­two hours before that Vote of no Delay was fully summed up!  Guardsman Paris is flying over France; cannot be taken; will be found some months after, self-shot in a remote inn. (Hist.  Parl. xxiii. 275, 318; Felix Lepelletier, Vie de Michel Lepelletier son Frere, p. 61. &c.  Felix, with due love of the miraculous, will have it that the Suicide in the inn was not Paris, but some double-ganger of his.)—­Robespierre sees reason to think that Prince d’Artois himself is privately in Town; that the Convention will be butchered in the lump.  Patriotism sounds mere wail and vengeance:  Santerre doubles and trebles all his patrols.  Pity is lost in rage and fear; the Convention has refused the three days of life and all respite.

Chapter 3.2.VIII.

Place de la Revolution.

To this conclusion, then, hast thou come, O hapless, Louis!  The Son of Sixty Kings is to die on the Scaffold by form of law.  Under Sixty Kings this same form of Law, form of Society, has been fashioning itself together, these thousand years; and has become, one way and other, a most strange Machine.  Surely, if needful, it is also frightful this Machine; dead, blind; not what it should be; which, with swift stroke, or by cold slow torture, has wasted the lives and souls of innumerable men.  And behold now a King himself, or say rather Kinghood in his person, is to expire here in cruel tortures;—­like a Phalaris shut in the belly of his own red-heated Brazen Bull!  It is ever so; and thou shouldst know it, O haughty tyrannous man:  injustice breeds injustice; curses and falsehoods do verily ‘return always home,’ wide as they may wander.  Innocent Louis bears the sins of many generations:  he too experiences that man’s tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.