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The king in shirtsleeves, coat already off, turning back to Edgeworth. The argument about binding his hands has just been lost.

The Republic tried him under the name it had issued him, Citizen Louis Capet, on the theory that kings were an office abolished and offices cannot be tried, only men. The evidence was real enough, an iron chest of secret correspondence with the powers preparing to invade, and the verdict was never in doubt; the drama was the sentence. For 36 hours in January the deputies of the Convention walked one at a time to the rostrum and voted aloud on the king's life, with the galleries keeping score. Among those voting death was his cousin, the duke of Orléans, restyled Philippe Égalité, a vote Paris never stopped discussing. The final arithmetic was close enough that history keeps rounding it: of 721 deputies, an outright majority for death, unconditional, of exactly one. A majority of one was enough; it always is. On the morning of 21 January 1793 the king rode for two hours through streets lined with 80,000 armed men and closed shutters, attended by an Irish-born priest named Henry Essex Edgeworth. At the scaffold in the former Place Louis XV, renamed Place de la Révolution, he took off his coat himself, argued briefly and lost over the binding of his hands, and began to speak to the crowd: that he died innocent, that he pardoned the authors of his death. The commander of the guard ordered the drums, and the rest of the sentence belongs to the drummers. The legend gives Edgeworth the parting line, son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven; Edgeworth himself, asked later, could not remember saying it. Spectators dipped handkerchiefs in the blood, some as relic, some as souvenir, the two not yet being different things. Within a fortnight France was at war with Britain, Holland and Spain on top of Austria and Prussia, and the year that began with one execution ran to 17,000. The queen followed in October; the boy the royalists called Louis XVII died in a locked room at ten; and the man who eventually restored the family, the dead king's brother, dated his reign from that room as if the intervening quarter century were a clerical error. Benazech, an Englishman trained in Paris, painted the last minutes rather than the blade: the king in white at the foot of the steps, turning back toward his confessor, the mounted officer's sword already pointing the way up, and the machine at the top right, drawn small, patient, and entirely without rhetoric. The picture sold across Europe as an engraving within the year; grief, too, had a market.