On the 24th of October, the imprisoned Girondin deputies appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Twenty-one in all; for, although some of the chiefs had vanished for the present, other accused persons, not originally belonging to them, had been thrown in to make up the orthodox number. Fouquier Tinville's act of accusation contained an elaborate statement of all the errors and crimes which the Mountain laid to their charge, the sum and substance of which was that they were royalists, federalists, formenters of civil war, conspirators against the Republic. Amar did not blush to accuse Brissot of having contemplated the ruin of the French colonies because he had made an attempt to emancipate their slaves; of having provoked the assassination of the patriots at the Champs de Mars because he had given the first Republican impulse; of having wished to stifle liberty because he had declared war against kings. The very acts that most redounded to the glory of the leader of the Gironde were turned into the engines of their ruin by the hatred of party. To what end, in fact, dwell on a trial at which their most determined enemies, Pache, Chaumette, Hébert, and others, appeared as witnesses against the Twenty-one—a trial of which the judgment was a foregone conclusion; nevertheless, much to the disgust of the Montagnards and Municipality, it was prolonged from day to day. Vergniaud, who had promised his friends to be the last to speak, could not contain his indignation at the calumnious evidence of a witness. Suddenly roused, he had one of those inspirations of eloquence whose pathos and sublimity had so often swayed the Assembly. The audience, the very jury, were moved sympathetically; that great voice was answered by
