Marie Antoinette was executed during the “reign of terror,” so-called, the sanguinary and precarious years 1793–94. Following the results of the revolution and its excesses all Europe had combined against France, and only the utmost concentration of internal forces made victory against such a coalition possible. The National Convention placed the direction of affairs in the hands of a committee of nine, among whom were Danton, Robespierre, Marat and St. Just, and this Committee saved France. They formed and sent into the field the volunteer armies which, at first unorganized, gradually obtained ascendancy over the experienced coalition troops and finally drove them from the field. Everything that might work injury to the troops at the front was ruthlessly put aside. Hundreds of aristocrats followed the King and Queen to the scaffold. Murder was the order of the day and thinned out not only the friends of the old régime, but also the ranks of the revolutionaries themselves. The earliest of these to fall in connection with the King’s execution was Le Pelletier, formerly the Comte de St. Fargeau, a member of the Convention, who was murdered by a member of the King’s body-guard on the eve of the execution of the King, on January 20, 1793, because he had voted for the King’s death. Busts of Le Pelletier and Brutus were placed in the Palace of Justice, and David quickly completed a fine painting of the victim which he offered to the Convention in the following terms: “Fellow Citizens, each one of us is responsible to the Fatherland for those gifts which nature has bestowed on us; diverse though their expression may be, the goal is the same for us all. Every true patriot should use every means to inspire his fellow citizens and bring before them at all times the great examples of heroism and virtue. I am moved by these thoughts in offering to the National Convention the painting of Michel Le Pelletier who was murdered in cowardly fashion because he voted for a tyrant’s death.” Unfortunately this painting has been lost. Le Pelletier’s descendants, into whose possession it passed, were Royalists, and hid the painting, destroying the plates and all the engravings which had been made from it. The reproduction (Fig. 15) was made from the only existing impression in the Cabinet of Engravings in the Louvre. The composition is conceived in the grand and austere manner which characterized David’s work in these days of terror and fanatically exaggerated idealism. [Illustration: FIG. 20. MARAT (1793) _Museum, Brussels_]