With these men fell the last revolutionists of that period, who shrank from founding a republic on massacre; who recoiled from substituting for a monarchy of corruption, a monarchy of bloodshed. The elements of their defeat lay as much in themselves, as in the events of their time. They were not, as a party, true to their own convictions; they temporised; they fatally attempted to take a middle course amid the terrible emergencies of a terrible epoch, and they fell—fell before worse men, because those men were in earnest. Condemned to die, the Girondins submitted nobly to their fate; their great glory was the glory of their deaths. The speech of one of them, on hearing his sentence pronounced, was a prophecy of the future, fulfilled to the letter. “_I_ die,” he said to the Jacobin judges, the creatures of Robespierre, who tried him, “_I_ die at a time when the people have lost their reason: _you_ will die on the day when they recover it.” Valaze was the only member of the condemned party who displayed a momentary weakness; he stabbed himself on hearing his sentence pronounced. But the blow was not mortal—he died on the scaffold, and died bravely with the rest. On the night of the 30th, the Girondists held their famous banquet in the prison; celebrated, with the ferocious stoicism of the time, their last social meeting before, the morning on which they were to die. Other men, besides the twenty-one, were present at this supper of the condemned. They were prisoners who held Girondin opinions, but whose names were not illustrious enough for history to preserve. Though sentenced to confinement, they were not sentenced to death. Some of their number, who had protested most boldly against the condemnation of the deputies, were ordered to witness the execution on the morrow, as a timely example to terrify them into submission. More than this, Robespierre and his colleagues did not as yet venture to attempt: the Reign of Terror was a cautious reign at starting. The supper-table of the prison was spread: the guests, twenty-one of their number stamped already with the seal of death, were congregated at the last Girondin banquet: toast followed toast; the _Marseillaise_ was sung; the desperate triumph of the feast was rising fast to its climax, when a new and ominous subject of conversation was started at the lower end of the table, and spread electrically, almost in a moment, to the top. This subject—by whom originated no one knew—was simply a question as to the hour in the morning at which the execution was to take place. Every one of the prisoners appeared to be in ignorance on this point; and the gaolers either could not, or would not enlighten them. Until the cart for the condemned rolled into the prison-yard, not one of the Girondins could tell whether he was to be called out to the guillotine soon after sunrise, or not till near noon.