Bailly, under the weight of a capital accusation, and precisely on account of a portion of the acts imputed to Marie Antoinette, was heard as a witness in the trial of that princess.  The annals of tribunals, either ancient or modern, never offered any thing like this.  What did they hope for?  To lead our colleague to make inexact declarations, or to concealments from a feeling of imminent personal danger?  To suggest the thought to him to save his own head at the expense of that of an unhappy woman?  To make virtue finally stagger?  At all events, this infernal combination failed; with a man like Bailly it could not succeed.

“Do you know the accused?” said the President to Bailly.  “Oh! yes, I do know her!” answered the witness, in a tone of emotion, and bowing respectfully to Marie Antoinette.  Bailly then protested with horror against the odious imputations that the act of accusation had put into the mouth of the young dauphin.  From that moment Bailly was treated with great harshness.  He seemed to have lost in the eyes of the tribunal the character of a witness, and to have become the accused.  The turn that the debates took would really authorize us to call the sitting in which the queen was condemned, (in which she figured ostensibly as the only one accused,) the trial of Marie Antoinette and of Bailly.  What signified, after all, this or that qualification of this monstrous trial? in the judgment of any man of feeling, never did Bailly prove himself more noble, more courageous, more worthy, than in this difficult situation.

Bailly appeared again before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and this time as the accused, the 10th of November 1793.  The accusation bore chiefly on the pretended participation of the Mayor of Paris in the escape of Louis XVI. and his family, and in the catastrophe that occurred in the Champ de Mars.

If any thing in the world appeared evident, even in 1793, even before the detailed revelations of the persons who took a more or less direct part in the event, it is, that Bailly did not facilitate the departure of the royal family; it is that, in proportion to the suspicions that reached him, he did all that was in his power to prevent their departure; it is, that the President of the sitting of the Jeu de Paume had not, and could never have had in any case, an intention of going to join the fugitive family in a strange country; it is that, finally, any act emanating from a public authority in which such expressions as the following could be found:  “The deep wickedness of Bailly....  Bailly thirsted for the people’s blood!” must have excited the disgust and indignation of good men, whatever might be their political opinions.