What distance was there between the steel of twenty thousand pikes and the heart of Louis XVI.?
Petion did not betray the lives of the king, the queen, and the children, but he placed them at stake.

The constitutional guard of the king had been ignominiously disbanded by the Girondists; the Duc de Brissac, its commander, was sent to the high court of Orleans, for imaginary conspiracies,--his only conspiracy was his honour; and he had sworn to die bravely in defence of his master and his friend.

He could have escaped, but though even the king advised him to fly, he refused.

"If I fly," replied he, to the king's entreaties, "it will be said that I am guilty, and that you are my accomplice; my flight will accuse you: I prefer to die." He left Paris for the national court of Orleans: he was not tried, but massacred at Versailles, on the 6th of September, and his head with its white hairs was planted on one of the palisades of the palace gates, as if in atrocious mockery of that chivalrous honour that even in death guarded the gate of the residence of his king.
III.
The first insurrections of the Revolution were the spontaneous impulses of the people: on one side was the king, the court and the nobility; on the other the nation.

These two parties clashed by the mere impulse of conflicting ideas and interests.