The murder of the king, which Madame Roland did so much to compass, led not indirectly to the ruin of her own most trusted political friends and associates. The murder of the queen, for which she had longed and laboured, was brought to pass, on October 16, 1793, by men who had then made up their minds to send herself to the scaffold, and who sent her to it, three weeks afterwards, on November 8, 1793. In the ridiculous revolutionary calendar of the epoch, this date stood as the 18th Brumaire; Year II. It was celebrated six years afterwards on the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII. of the Republic, by the advent to supreme authority of the Corsican soldier who was to found a despotic empire upon the results of that 'universal war' into which France had been insanely driven by 'the soul of the Gironde.' A mere coincidence, of course! It was a mere coincidence, too, that the Girondist, Dufriche-Valaze, who, at the trial of Louis XVI., especially gratified the personal malignity of Madame Roland by the insolence with which he treated the royal captive, should have tried to save his own head when he and his comrades at last were writhing in the iron grip of Robespierre, by eagerly denouncing his friend and associate, Valady, as the real author of a particularly virulent placard intended by the Girondists to turn the fury of the Parisian mob against the Jacobins! Seeing that he had disgraced himself to no purpose, the wretched creature, who had contrived to conceal a dagger about his person, drew it out when the merciless prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, rising in his place, demanded, on October 29, 1793, that all the Girondists then on trial, having been found guilty by the jury--though no plea had been heard in their defence, and the judge had not summed up--should be instantly condemned to suffer death and the confiscation of their property under the Law of December 16, 1792--a law passed by the Girondists themselves, and highly approved by 'the soul of the Gironde.' Unobserved in the general excitement Valaze drove the dagger into his heart, and crying out, 'I am a dead man!' fell bleeding to the floor. When his companions had been removed by the guards, Fouquier-Tinville rose again in his place, and requested that the tribunal would order the corpse before them to be taken with the living criminals to the Place de la Revolution, and there with them _guillotined_! From this even the Convention shrank. But the dead body of Valaze was in fact carried in a little cart through the streets of Paris, behind the dismal cortege of the condemned, 'lying stretched upon the back, and the face uncovered,' on October 31. After the execution was over it was flung, with the remains of his companions, into a great pit. This was the end, for Madame Roland and her worshippers, in four short years, of the 'great reformation' of which, on May 17, 1790, she had written to one of her friends that it could only be carried through by 'burning many more chateaux!'