On January 15, 1793, to the momentous question if the prisoner at the bar were guilty, Condorcet answered, ‘Yes:’ he had conspired against liberty. On the 17th and 18th the vote was taken on the nature of the punishment to be awarded. Consider the judgment-hall filled with the fierce faces and wild natures of men who, for centuries starved of their liberties, had drunk the first maddening draught of power. Consider that among them this noble alone represented a class they hated worse than they hated royalty itself, that if he had forsworn it, broken with it, denied it, he had still its high bearing, its maddening self-possession and self-control. We vote for death--shall you dare to know better? An Orleans sitteth and speaketh against his own kin; why not a noble, then, who owes him nothing? Condorcet rises in his place and pronounces for exile--the severest penalty in the penal code which is not death. ‘The punishment of death is against my principles, and I shall not vote for it. I propose further that the decision of the Convention shall be ratified by an appeal to the people.’ On Saturday, January 19, 1793, the execution of the King having been fixed for the Monday, Condorcet implored his colleagues to neutralise the fatal effect of their decision on the other European Powers by abolishing the punishment of death altogether. With the Terror then struggling to the birth in her wild breast, one of the greatest children of his country begged for the suppression of that penalty as the most ‘efficacious way of perfecting human-kind in destroying that leaning to ferocity which has long dishonoured it. Punishments which admit of correction and repentance are the only ones fit for regenerated humanity.’ In the roar of that fierce storm of human passions, the quiet voice was unheeded, but not unheard. There were those who looked up at the speaker, and remembered his words--for his ruin. How far, up to this point, Condorcet realised his danger is hard to say. A Louis, with the fatal blindness of kingship, might believe to the last that his person really _was_ inviolable, that from the tumbril itself loyal hands would deliver his majesty from the insult of a malefactor’s death. But a Condorcet? The immediate result of his part in the King’s trial was that his name was struck from the roll of the Academies of St. Petersburg and Berlin. That insult touched him so little that there is not a single allusion to it in his writings. In the month succeeding the King’s death, a Commission of nine members of the Convention, of whom Condorcet was one, laid before it their project for the New Constitution of the Year II., to which Condorcet had written an elaborate Preface. The project was not taken. Hérault de Séchelles made a new one. In his bold and scathing criticism upon it--his ‘Appeal to the French Citizens on the Project of the New Constitution’--Condorcet signed his own condemnation.