On the seventh of November the Girondists began the indictment against the king, assisted by the fatal deposit of papers in the iron safe, although those were missing which were confided to Mme. Campan. After Gamain's opening the press, which was to have so severe an effect on the prisoners in the temple, Roland had taken them all to his office, where he read them and docketed them, though he vainly searched for the evidence of Danton's oft-cited venality. Besides, Danton had resigned as Minister of Justice.
This great trial was to crown the victory of Valmy, which had made the defeated King of Prussia almost as angry as the news of the proclamation of the Republic in Paris.
This trial was another step toward the goal to which men blundered like the blind, always excepting the Invisibles; they saw things in the mass, but not in detail. Alone on the horizon stood the red guillotine, with the king at the foot of the scaffold on which it rose.
In a materialistic era, when such a man as Danton was the head of the indulgent party, it was difficult for the wish not to be outrun by the deed; yet only a few of the Convention comprehended that royalty should be extirpated, and not the royal person slain.
Royalty was a somber abstraction, a menacing mystery of which men were weary, a whited sepulcher, fair without, but full of rottenness.
But the king was a different matter; a man who was far from interesting in his prosperity, but purified by misfortune and made great by captivity. Even on the queen the magic of adversity was such that she had learned, not to love—for her broken heart was a shattered vase from which the precious ointment had leaked out—but to venerate and adore, in the religious sense of the word, this prince, though a man whose bodily appetite and vulgar instincts had so often caused her to blush.
Royalty smitten with death, but the king kept in perpetual imprisonment, was a conception so grand and mighty that but few entertained it.
"The king must stand trial," said the ex-priest Gregoire to the Convention; "but he has done so much to earn scorn that we have no room for hatred."
And Tom Paine wrote: