Petion allowed them to make all their preparations without appearing to see them, and legalised them whenever they were completed.

II.

His early connection with Brissot had drawn him towards Madame Roland.  The ministry of Roland, Claviere, and Servan obeyed him more than even the king, he was present at all their consultations, and although their fall did not involve him, it wrested the executive power from his grasp.  The expelled Girondists had no need to infuse their thirst of vengeance into the mind of Petion.  Unable any longer to conspire legally against the king, with his ministers, he yet could conspire with the factions against the Tuileries.  The national guards, the people, the Jacobins, the faubourgs, the whole city, were in his hands; thus he could give sedition to the Girondists to aid this party to regain the ministry; and he gave it them with all the hazards—­all the crimes that sedition carries with it.  Amongst these hazards was the assassination of the king and his family:  this event was beforehand accepted by those who provoked the assembly of the populace, and their invasion of the king’s palace.  Girondists, Orleanists, Republicans, Anarchists, none of these parties perhaps actually meditated this crime, but they looked upon it as an eventuality of their fortune.  Petion, who doubtless did not desire it, at least risked it; and if his intention was innocent, his temerity was a murder.  What distance was there between the steel of twenty thousand pikes and the heart of Louis XVI.?  Petion did not betray the lives of the king, the queen, and the children, but he placed them at stake.  The constitutional guard of the king had been ignominiously disbanded by the Girondists; the Duc de Brissac, its commander, was sent to the high court of Orleans, for imaginary conspiracies,—­his only conspiracy was his honour; and he had sworn to die bravely in defence of his master and his friend.  He could have escaped, but though even the king advised him to fly, he refused.  “If I fly,” replied he, to the king’s entreaties, “it will be said that I am guilty, and that you are my accomplice; my flight will accuse you:  I prefer to die.”  He left Paris for the national court of Orleans:  he was not tried, but massacred at Versailles, on the 6th of September, and his head with its white hairs was planted on one of the palisades of the palace gates, as if in atrocious mockery of that chivalrous honour that even in death guarded the gate of the residence of his king.

III.

The first insurrections of the Revolution were the spontaneous impulses of the people:  on one side was the king, the court and the nobility; on the other the nation.  These two parties clashed by the mere impulse of conflicting ideas and interests.  A word—­a gesture—­a chance—­the assembling a body of troops—­a day’s scarcity—­the vehement address of an orator in the Palais Royal, sufficed to excite the populace to revolt, or to march on Versailles.  The spirit of sedition was confounded with the spirit of the Revolution.  Every one was factious—­every one was a soldier—­every one was a leader.  Public passion gave the signal, and chance commanded.