A law was passed by the Convention, in September, which decreed that all suspected people should be arrested and brought before this tribunal; that nobles, lawyers, bankers, priests, men of property, and strangers in the land, should be suspected unless known to be acting friends and adherents of the ultra-revolutionary party; that the punishment of such persons should be death; and that the members of any revolutionary tribunal which had omitted to condemn any suspected person, should themselves be tried, and punished by death.

Such was the law by which the Reign of Terror was organized and rendered possible.
At this time the Girondists were lying in prison, awaiting their trial and their certain doom.

Marie Antoinette had been removed from the Temple to the Conciergerie, and her trial was in a day or two about to commence.

Her fate was already fixed, and had only to be pronounced.
Danton had retired from Paris to his own province, sick with the shedding of so much blood, jealous of the pre-eminence which Robespierre had assumed; watching his opportunity to return, that he might sell the republic to the royalists; equally eager, let us believe, to save his country as to make his fortune, but destined to return, only that he also might bend his neck beneath the monster guillotine.

Marat, the foulest birth of the revolution, whose licentious heat generated venom and rascality, as a dunghill out of its own filth produces adders' eggs--Marat was no more.