n of atheism in the Assembly, was the son of a perfumer
in Provence. They were adventurers as utterly without principle as without
resources. And their first thought appears to have been to make money of
the king's difficulties, and to sell themselves to him. They applied to
the Minister of the Interior, M. de Lessart, proposing to place the whole
of their influence at the service of the Government, on condition of his
securing each of them a pension of six thousand francs a month.[1] M. de
Lessart would not have objected to buy them, but he thought the price
which they set upon themselves too high; and as they adhered to their
demand, the negotiation went off, and they resolved to revenge themselves
on his royal master with all the malice of disappointed rapacity.

As none of them had any force of character, they fell under the influence
of the wife of one of their number, a small manufacturer, named Roland,
the same who, as we have already seen, was the first to raise the cry of
blood in France, and to recommend the assassination of the king and queen
while they were still in fancied security at Versailles. Under the
direction of this fierce woman, whose ferocity was rendered more
formidable by her undoubted talents, the Girondins began an internecine
war with the king, who had refused them the wages which they had asked.
They planned and carried out the sanguinary attacks on the palace in the
summer of the next year. They brought Louis to the scaffold by the
unanimity of their votes. Yet it would have been more fortunate for
themselves as well as for him had they been less exorbitant in their
demands, and had they connected themselves with the Government as they
desired. For though they succeeded in their treason, though Madame Roland
saw the accomplishment of her wish in the murder of the king and queen,
their success was equally fatal to themselves. Almost all of them perished
on the same scaffold to which they had consigned their virtuous
sovereigns, meeting a fate in one respect worse even than theirs, from the
infamy of the names which they have left behind them.

Yet for a few days it seemed as if their malignity would miss its aim.
They did not wait a single day before displaying it; but, at the
preliminary meeting of the Assembly, before it was opened for the dispatch
of business, Vergniaud proposed to declare it illegal to speak of the king
as his majesty, or to address him as "sire;" while another deputy, na