monster of evil, this last embodiment of Satan,
must be there. M. Jacquemin is mounting the
ladder, when Corporal Dautrep, of the Municipal
Guard, draws him back.

"If they are there," he says, " I am armed."

He mounts with sword drawn and pistol
ready. His comrades wait impatiently for
his cry for help; but there is nothing there
but a portmanteau that has held gun-barrels, a
hammer, a flask basket, and a sealed letter.
Just then, a soldier, looking out at the window,
finds a rope hanging down into the court
below. It is covered, in places, with blood,
and the police at once feel sure that the
assassins have escaped in that direction.

Whilst all this was going on, Daudin, a sharp
officer, who had ran into the court of the fatal
Maison Travaut with some men of his brigade,
hears Lefèvre, one of his police agents, crying:

"I see a man dropping from a rope into the
next court."

Lefèvre and a comrade named Devillers
instantly climbed on to the roof of the shed that
looked into the next yard, while Daudin went
round by another door to the door of the Café
des Milles Colonnes, next door, when he was
arrested by mistake, and led off to the Château
d'Eau. In the mean time, the two agents had
come upon a short stoutly built man, staggering
from a dreadful gaping wound in his temple,
and trying, with both hands, to press back the
blood that was gushing down over his eyes.
He could make no resistance, and was at olace
led to the Château d'Eau with bayonets held
to his breast.

They found on him six francs fifty
centimes, a packet of gunpowder, a knife with
a horn handle, a pair of green spectacles,
a watch, and a life-preserver made of cord and
weighted with lead. In the confusion of
numerous arrests, the man contrived
unobserved to throw a poignard with a silver handle
under a camp-bed. Taken back to the room
where the infernal machine was, and examined
before M. Gisquet, the prefect of police, the
procureur-general, the king's procureur, and
the commissaries of police, the man explained
by signs that he was the assassin, and confessed
that his name was Girard, the name found on
some receipts for rent which had been
discovered to belong to him. He was then handed
over to Dr. Marjolin and Dr. Ollivier d' Angers,
and, about two o'clock, taken to the
Conciergerie.

The indignation at the hideous fanaticism,
the bloodthirsty vanity, of such a patriot as
Girard, and all who instigated or aided him,
was deep and heartfelt. The people felt that the
king represented, however imperfectly, peace,
order, and prosperity, and that without him
anarchy and murder must reign supreme. The
National Guards, who that very morning had
been so cold and silent, were now loud and
enthusiastic in their cheers, and as the king rode
mournfully back to the Tuileries, shakos waved
on thousands of bayonets, and the "Vive le
Roi!" ran deafening from street to street.

The Bourbonists, who had declared that the
Duke de Berry died stabbed by Guizot and
Decaze's liberal ideas, were now told that the
Duchess de Berry's party had incited this
murder. Party spirit, often dishonest, was
now atrociously so. Each party tried by every
mean and dishonourable shift to throw the odium
of the crime upon its adversaries. In a letter to
Marshal Lobau, the king spoke ominously of
the murder:

"Frenchmen," the king wrote, " the National
Guard and the army are mourning; French
families are sorrowing. A frightful spectacle
has lacerated every heart. An old warrior, an
old friend, spared by the fire of a hundred
battles, has fallen by my side, struck by the blows
that the assassin destined for me. In their desire
to reach me, they have immolated glory, honour,
and patriotism, peaceful citizens, women, and
children; yes, Paris has seen her best blood
shed in the same spot and on the same day on
which it was poured five years ago to maintain
the laws of the country." The very day of the
attempt the Chamber of Peers was organised
as a court of justice to try the conspirators,
under the presidency of Baron Pasquier.

Girard was twice examined the day of the
massacre, first at No. 50, then in the Conciergerie.
At first faint and bleeding, he could only feebly
hold up his fingers in reply to the questions.
He implied that he was alone in the plot; that
he had been for weeks making the infernal
machine; that it was his own idea alone. He
then fell back fainting; no more could at
that time be got out of him. In the evening,
bandaged and slightly stronger, he confessed
that he had had accomplices, but declared that he
alone held the blind up and fired the train. He
was a republican. The agony of his wounds
then compelled the doctors to forbid the
wretch being tortured by further questions.
The next morning the man was better, and could
speak. He said his name was Joseph Francis
Girard, and his wife and child were at Lodève,
near Montpellier. He was thirty-nine years of
age. The judge representing the enormity of
the crime, Girard cried, with broken words:

"I am an unfortunate man. I am miserable.
I can hope for nothing. I may render a service.
We shall see. I regret what I have done. I
may perhaps stop something. I will name no
one. I will sell no one. My crime has been
too much for my reason." He confessed that the
newspapers had excited him to the crime. He
spoke of the émeutes in the Rue Transnanain and
at Lyons.

It was still doubtful whether Girard had really
had accomplices. One man declared he had
seen three persons at the window, and others
imagined they saw conspirators escaping over
the roof towards the Rue des Fosses du Temple.
The portmanteau that contained the gun-barrels
was the great clue upon which the police relied.
It had been brought to Girard three or four
days before the crime, and Girard said it came
from his wife, and contained linen and brandy.
A waterman at the cabriolet stand in the Rue
Vendôme had carried it from the corner of the
Rue Chariot to No. 50 in the Temple boulevard.