General Charles-François Dumouriez--In Command of the French at Valmy 197 Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Counsel for the King at his Trial 199 Republican soldiers in the Revolution 202 Proclamation of the Provisional Executive Council 204 The last victims of the Terror 209 King Louis taking leave of his family in the tower of the Temple 211 A Mass under the Terror 214 The death of King Louis XVI, January 21, 1793 216 PART ONE THE ROYAL SEANCE [Illustration: LOUIS XVI From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of the painting by Antoine-François Callet, in Museum of Versailles _To face p. 15_ ] THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY PART ONE THE ROYAL SEANCE Upon the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village, the old stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are consonant with its name. It is called “Marly of the King.” There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall the palace to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue or mourning withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more domestic and far less burdened with state. To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o’clock, just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a great coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop of Paris, coming urgently to see the king, and the day was Friday, the nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the Revolution. The tall windows of the palace were fully lit as the coach came up the drive. The night air was cold, for those June days were rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop of Paris and his colleague of Rouen, who was with him, were summoned by their titles into the room where Louis XVI sat discussing what should be done for the throne. Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the commons of the great Parliament--the Commons House in that great Parliament which had met again after a hundred years, and which now felt behind it the nation--had taken the first revolutionary step and had usurped authority. The quarrel which had hampered all reform since this Parliament of the States General had met six weeks before; the refusal of the two privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to vote with the commons and to form with them one National Assembly; the claim of the privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to bar whatever the popular representatives might decide--all that had been destroyed in spirit by a new act of sovereignty.