It has been said by the defenders of the “regicide” that Philippe Égalité did his best not to be present at the sitting of the Convention when sentence had to be passed on the unfortunate king; but that he was threatened by his friends of the Left with assassination unless he voted with them for the “death of the tyrant.” However that may be, he took his seat among the judges by whom the fate of his royal kinsman was to be decided, and, when it became his turn to deliver his opinion, did so in the following words: “Occupied solely with my duty, convinced that all those who have attacked, or might afterwards attack, the sovereignty of the people deserve death, I pronounce the death of Louis.” Philippe Égalité had looked for general approval, and had voted in fear of death--which awaited him all the same, and came to him in the very form in which a few months before it had been inflicted on the unhappy Louis. When his vote was made known cries of indignation from all sides warned him that he had transgressed one of the great moral laws which are observed even by men who violate all others. Then it was that a former soldier of the King’s Body-guard, hearing of Philippe Égalité’s unnatural offence, resolved to kill him, but not being able to find him, killed another less guilty “regicide” in his place. Very different was the feeling excited by the conduct of Philippe Égalité in the breast of the king himself. “I don’t know by what chance,” says the Abbé Edgeworth in his “Relation sur les Derniers Momens du Roi,” “the conversation fell upon Philippe. The king seemed to be well acquainted with his intrigues and with the horrid part he had taken at the Convention. But he spoke of him without any bitterness, and with pity rather than with anger. ‘What have I done to my cousin,’ he exclaimed, ‘that he should so persecute me? What object could he have? Oh, he is more to be pitied than I am. My lot is melancholy, no doubt, but his is much more so.’” Meanwhile the faction of the Assembly which in the beginning of September, 1792, had, by its excited declamation and denunciation, brought about the massacre of the prisoners, was constantly attempting, in combination with other factions, to arrest some of the most influential members of the majority, accuse them of treason, and bring them before the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the 2nd of June, 1793, they struck their first blow; and on the 3rd of October in the same year they denounced forty-four deputies, ordered the arrest of seventy-one, and compelled many more to take to flight and seek safety in concealment. The majority was thus diminished by 150 members: the minority in fact became the majority.