No room for compromise now. The printed trial of Charles I. was everywhere sold and read. "This," people said, "was how the English dealt with an impossible king and became a free nation." Old and new were in death-grapple, and the lives of many victims, for the people lost heavily,[162] had sealed the cause of the Revolution with a bloody consecration. Unhappily, the city of Paris, like all great towns in times of scarcity (and since 1780 scarcity had become almost permanent), had been invaded by numbers of starving vagabonds--the dregs that always rise to the surface in periods of political convulsion, ready for any villainy. When news came of the capture of Verdun, of the indecent joy of the courtiers, and that the road to Paris was open to the avenging army of Prussians, the horrors of the Armagnac massacres were renewed during four September days at the prisons of Paris, while the revolutionary ministry and the Assembly averted their gaze and, to their everlasting shame, abdicated their powers. The September massacres were the application by a minority of desperate and savage revolutionists of the _ultima ratio_ of kings to a desperate situation. The tragedy of King Louis is the tragedy of a feeble prince called to rule in a tremendous crisis where weakness and well-meaning folly are the fatalest of crimes. How pathetic are the incidents of the penalty of wrong! The dreadful heritage of the sins of the later French monarchy had fallen on the head of one of the best-intentioned and least guilty, though most foolish and feeblest of men. On 21st September 1792 royalty was formally abolished, and on the 22nd, when "the equinoctional sun marked the equality of day and night in the heavens," civil equality was proclaimed by the representatives of France. CHAPTER XVIII EXECUTION OF THE KING--PARIS UNDER THE FIRST REPUBLIC--THE TERROR--NAPOLEON--REVOLUTIONARY AND MODERN PARIS An inscription opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli indicates the site of the old Salle du Manége, or Riding School, of the Tuileries, where the destinies of modern France were debated. Three Assemblies--the Constituent, the Legislative and the prodigious National Convention--filled its long, poorly-furnished amphitheatre, decorated with the tattered flags captured from the Prussians and Austrians, from 7th November 1789 to 9th May 1795.