A decree was immediately passed ordering the arrest of every Bourbon in France. The duke was arrested and conveyed to Marseilles, with several members of his family. Here he was held in durance for some time, and was then brought to Paris to be tried for treason. Though there was no evidence whatever against him, he was declared guilty of being "an accomplice in a conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic," and was condemned to death.
The duke, as he heard the sentence, replied: "Since you were predetermined to put me to death, you ought at least to have sought for more plausible pretexts to attain that end; for you will never persuade the world that you deem me guilty of what you now declare me to be convicted. However, since my lot is decided, I demand that you will not let me languish here until to-morrow, but order that I be led to execution instantly." His request was not granted; but he was conducted back to the cells of the Conciergerie, to be executed the next day. The next morning he was placed in the death-cart at the Conciergerie, with four others of the condemned, to be conveyed to the guillotine, which stood in the Place de la Concorde. He was elaborately dressed in a green frock-coat, white waistcoat, doe-skin breeches, and with boots carefully polished. His hair was dressed and powdered with care. As the cart passed slowly along in front of his princely abode, the Palais Royal, and through immense crowds, lining the streets, who formerly had been fed by his liberality, and who now clamored for his death, he looked around upon them with apparently perfect indifference.
Execution of Egalité.
At the guillotine the executioner took off his coat, and was about to draw off his boots, when he said, calmly, "It is only loss of time; you will remove them more easily from my lifeless limbs." He examined the keen edge of the knife, and was bound to the plank. The slide fell, and his head dropped into the basket. Thus perished Louis Philippe Egalité in the 46th year of his age. It was the 6th of November, 1793, ten months after Louis XVI. had perished upon the same scaffold. The immoralities of the Duke of Orleans were such that it has often been said of him, "Nothing became his life so much as his manner of leaving it." Louis Philippe Egalité, inheriting from his ancestors vast opulence, had become, by his marriage with the daughter of the immensely wealthy Duke of Penthièvre, the possessor of almost royal domains. His wife, the duchess, though aristocratic in all her prepossessions, and sympathizing not at all with her husband in his democratic views, was a woman of unblemished character, of amiable disposition, and of devoted piety.
Having thus given a brief account of the origin of the Orleans family, we must, at the expense of a little repetition, turn back to the birth of Louis Philippe, the oldest son of the Duke of Orleans, and the subject of this memoir.
Birth of Louis Philippe.
Louis Philippe was born in the Palais Royal, in Paris, on the 6th of October, 1773. In his early years, he, with the other children of the ducal family, was placed under the care and tuition of the celebrated Madame de Genlis. Until the death of his father, he bore the title of the Duke of Chartres.
"The Duke of Chartres," writes Lamartine, "had no youth. Education suppressed this age in the pupils of Madame de Genlis. Reflection, study, premeditation of every thought and act, replaced nature by study, and instinct by will. At seventeen years of age, the young prince had the maturity of advanced years."
His daily journal.
Madame de Genlis was unwearied in her endeavors to confer upon her illustrious pupil the highest intellectual and religious education. The most distinguished professors were appointed to instruct in those branches with which she was not familiar. His conduct was recorded in a minute daily journal, from which every night questions were read subjecting him to the most searching self-examination. The questions were as follows: