Dangeau passed into one of the lower galleries reserved for members and their friends. His limbs were cramped with the long session, and his throat was parched and dry; coffee was to be had, he knew, and he was in quest of it. As he got clear of the thronged entrance, a strange sight met his eye, for the gallery resembled a box at the opera, infinitely extended.
Bare-necked women flashed their diamonds and their wit, chattering, laughing, and exchanging sallies with their friends.
Refreshments were being passed round, and Deputies who were at leisure bowed, and smiled, and did the honours, as if it were a place of amusement, and not a hall of judgment.
A bold, brown-faced woman, with magnificent black eyes, her full figure much accentuated by a flaring tricolour sash, swept to the front of the gallery, and looked down. In her wake came a sleepy, white-fleshed blonde, mincing as she walked. She too wore the tricolour, and Dangeau's lips curled at the desecration.
"Philippe is voting," cried the brown woman loudly. "See, Jeanne, there he comes!"
Dangeau looked down, and saw Philippe Égalité, sometime Philippe d'Orleans, prince of the blood and cousin of the King, pass up the tribune steps. Under the lamps his face showed red and blotched, his eyes unsteady; but he walked jauntily, twisting a seal at his fob. His attire bespoke the dandy, his manner the poseur. Opposite to Vergniaud he bowed with elegance, and cried in a voice of loud effrontery, "I vote for Death."
Through the Assembly ran a shudder of recoil. Natural feeling was not yet brayed to dust in the mortar of the Revolution, and it thrilled and quickened to the spectacle of kinsman rising against kinsman, and the old blood royal of France turning from its ruined head publicly, and in the sight of all men.
"It is good that Louis should die, but it is not good that Philippe should vote for his death. Has the man no decency?" growled Danton at Dangeau's ear.
Long after, when his own hour was striking, Philippe d'Orleans protested that he had voted upon his soul and conscience—the soul whose existence he denied, and the conscience whose voice he had stifled for forty years. Be that between him and that soul and conscience, but, as he descended the tribune steps, Girondin, Jacobin, and Cordelier alike drew back from him, and men who would have cried death to the King's cousin, cried none the less, "Shame on Égalité!"
Only the bold brown woman and her companion laughed. The former even leaned across the bar and kissed her hand, waving, and beckoning him.