The trial of Fieschi and his accomplices took place on the 30th of January, 1836, before the Court of Peers assembled in the palace of the Luxembourg. In the body of the court, in front of the clerk's table, were displayed, among other proofs against the prisoners, a machine supporting a number of guns in an inclined position, an extinguished firebrand, a dagger, a shot belt with a quantity of bullets in it, an iron gauntlet, and a bloodstained rope. Fieschi, the chief conspirator, is described by Louis Blanc as "endowed with an energy and shrewdness which merely served to promote the aims of an inveterate and grovelling turpitude. Vain to a degree which almost approached insanity, this man had stained his life with every infamy. A Corsican by birth, he had fought bravely in the service of Napoleon. After the peace, however, he had launched upon a career of vice and crime. He had invented the so-called infernal machine (which was simply a battery of guns so arranged that they could be discharged from a window), not from any political or personal hatred of Louis Philippe, but simply as the hireling of a band of Republican and Revolutionary conspirators." Fieschi and his accomplices were duly guillotined. Other attempts had been made and were still to be made on the life of Louis Philippe. The ferocious exploit, however, of Fieschi remains the most notorious one of this reign. At last the Citizen King lost his nerve; and in February, 1848, disappeared in face of a danger not more formidable, if firmly met at the outset, than the one which he had despised thirteen years previously, in 1835. Fieschi was simply guillotined; and he was the first regicide or would-be regicide in France who escaped torture. The horrible cruelties inflicted on the assassins of French kings may make many persons less sensitive than they otherwise would be to the misfortunes reserved for the successors of these princes. The only possible excuse for the diabolical punishments devised for regicides under the old French Monarchy is that such barbarity was of the age. The torture of Damiens was imitated in every detail from the torture of Ravaillac, which had for precedent the torture of Gérard, the assassin of the Prince of Orange. An ingenious French writer attempted to decide whether Ravaillac's torments were greater than those of Gérard. It is certain in any case that the latter suffered with much greater constancy. Ravaillac shrieked out in a terrible manner, whereas Balthasar Gérard never uttered a groan.