For a third time Robespierre spoke. He spoke with more emotion than his peculiar academic style commonly permitted. Though he was in no way representative as yet of public feeling, though he was still a lesser man among those hundreds, for the third time his opinion coincided with that which was to prevail. He implored the assembly not to reopen the whole issue of civil war by putting this grave matter upon which they had fixedly decided to a general vote of millions. Not for the first time did this unalterable man betray for a moment his own unalterable creed. Later he was himself to perish in punishment divine of such deviations from the conscience of equality and of citizenship. Guadet--Guadet, the Girondin--spoke for the king in the legal matter. Merlin, a jurisconsult of some weight, replied. It was not true, he said, that by the traditions of the common law a majority of two-thirds was required to confirm so grave a sentence in any tribunal. Upon points of _fact_, he urged, a majority not of two-thirds, but more,--of ten out of twelve judges or assessors should determine,--but for the _penalty_ a bare majority--three votes out of five given from the bench--had always been held sufficient. The appeal of Louis was rejected, and the Convention rose after a continued session of thirty-six hours. There remained the question of respite. It was debated upon the next day, Friday, the 18th of January. It was with a singular difficulty that this second debate proceeded. Men left their places time and again during the course of the day; there was such confusion that no vote could be taken; and all the Saturday the thing hung in the balance right on into the small hours--the dark and cold small hours of the January night. It was three o’clock upon the Sunday morning before the final vote appeared. Six hundred and ninety men decided it, and a majority of seventy was found for immediate death. That Sunday, Louis, in the prison of the Temple, in the great square tower where he and his wife and his children and his sister had now for many months been held captive, suffered his passion. It is singular, instructive, a lesson in history, to note what the man’s temper was during this prodigious time. The curious may examine (displayed under glass in the archives for all to see) the note which he wrote out with his own hand in his prison. It proves in its handwriting and in its composition, in its very erasures, a momentous calm. If courage in the presence of death be a chief index to character, admire so complete a courage present in a man whose lack of judgment, torpor, grave lethargies, whose imbecilities even, had helped to bring him where he was. Louis, but for his death, might pass to history among the negligible figures of her roll; but see how he died!