concealed it. But Danton and his friends were total strangers to the whole affair. It served, however, to shed an air of corruption upon all those inculpated. When Danton was first questioned, his reply was, that his existence would now be annihilated, but that his name would survive in the pantheon of history. As to life, he said, it was a burden of which he was impatient to be delivered. The items of accusation he scorned as absurd. He demanded to be confronted with his enemies. Let St. Just and Robespierre appear as witnesses. The juries stood abashed, the judges frightened, at the loud and animated apostrophe of Danton; and they took refuge from his voice and his regard in questioning the other prisoners. The court sent to consult the committee of government as to the appearance of its members, which Danton demanded. They declined to appear, and even showed anger. But on the second day of trial the accused insisted, clamoured, and the feelings of the popular audience began to be stirred in their favour. At these dangerous symptoms, the public accuser wrote to the committee re-stating the demands of the accused, and the sympathy of the public in their favour. He concluded by warning the government that a storm was brewing. St. Just and his colleagues were at first at a loss how to conjure this storm, until word was brought that the excitement caused by the trial had not only shown itself in the court, but also in the prisons. A popular movement in favour of Danton was expected. To favour it, General Dillon, who was imprisoned in the Luxembourg, endeavoured to send a sum of money to the wife of Camille Desmoulins, to suborn a crowd. This was quite sufficient for St. Just, who came alone to the convention, represented the storm which had arisen before the revolutionary tribunal as a revolt of the accused, which had been got up with a conspiracy hatched in the prisons to deliver the prisoners, Dillon being at the CHAP. XLI. XLI. CHAP. head of it. By these allegations, St. Just obtained a decree of the convention, empowering the president of the revolutionary tribunal to employ all means for repressing any attempt on the part of the accused to obstruct the course of justice.* Armed with this, the president of the tribunal cut short at once the demands of the accused, as well as the defence, by declaring the court sufficiently informed. The jury, asked, gave as reply, that they were so. "Thus we are not allowed liberty of defence even on our trial," exclaimed the Dantonists. "Well," added their chief, "we have lived long enough for glory, lead us to the scaffold." Conducted at once to the prisons of the Conciergerie below, the sentence of condemnation which followed was read to them there. The judges feared to allow the sentence to be passed before the public. Condemned on the 4th, Danton and his co-accused were brought to the guillotine on the following day. When Hérault and Danton were about to take a last embrace at the foot of the scaffold, the executioner tried to prevent them. "Why, you are more cruel than death itself," said Danton. "But you cannot prevent our heads from embracing in your fatal basket." Camille Desmoulins thought but of his wife and child, the former doomed to follow him to the guillotine. Danton, too, left a young wife and a posthumous child. These men of revolution and blood attempted to build for themselves a little bower of domestic bliss apart from the storm and the carnage. Robespierre was wiser. He had paid his addresses to one of the daughters of his host, the carpenter Duplay. But he declined to marry, seeing the insecurity of human life in such times. His admirers still draw pictures of his domestic happiness, which must indeed have been complete, he, * Report of trial in Buchez and Roux, as also Fouquier Tinville's subsequent trial. † For what passed in the interior of the prison, see the Mémoire de Riouffe, et Mémoires sur les Prisons. XLI. as member of the committee, sending hundreds to the CHAP. revolutionary tribunal, where Duplay sat as jury to forward them to the scaffold. The calm of such a domestic circle is not enviable. Another of the daughters of Duplay married the terrorist Lebas. Robespierre did well not to wive. Danton and Camille Desmoulins, the procureur-général de la lanterne, made the trial, and brought death and ruin on their families. Human tigers should not pair. Tyranny has reached its extreme when it sacrifices the lives of its own partisans to mere caprice, to jealousy, or personal motives, without an avowable principle or pretext for such acts of blood. The execution of Danton was of this kind. No one had more fully devoted his energies to violent revolution, or more completely flung away all scruples in prosecuting it. If crimes could be redeemed by energy or eloquence, his were certainly effaced. If the revolution or its children could feel gratitude, it must have been for Danton. All such considerations were overborne in the hearts of Robespierre and St. Just by envy and personal hatred. Danton was a rival, yet menacing to power and consideration, not to life. He was not inveterately hostile; but he stood in the way, and was to be swept out of it. There was no crime that revolutionists at least could seriously lay to his charge; and consequently, when Danton did perish, the remaining members of the convention could not but see that the same fate awaited them the moment that they ceased to satisfy the exigencies or the humour of Robespierre. From that moment, which was also the culminating point of his triumph, dates the commencement of his downfall. All felt then not only the extravagance of the tyranny, but the utter heartlessness of the tyrant. He had sacrificed Danton to his jealousy, and was seen to witness and rub his hands with pleasure at his execu XLI. CHAP. tion.* He had attended the wedding of Camille Desmoulins as a friend of the family, and fondled his children, which did not prevent his sending husband and wife to the scaffold with a cold-blooded and sanguinary selfishness, fortunately rare and monstrous in human nature. Such acts begot in the hearts even of the most guilty a desire, sedulously concealed, to strike down the ruthless tyrant, whenever the current of events or his own imprudence should afford the opportunity. Robespierre and his friend St. Just deemed themselves at first secure in their triumph. The latter had invited or concocted the pretended conspiracy of the prisons, to enable the revolutionary tribunal to despatch the affair of Danton. Their story sufficed to send to the scaffold, in a few days after, Dillon, and the widows of Camille Desmoulins and of Hébert; with them were joined Chaumette and Gobel, the priests of the goddess of Reason, some twenty in all. The public scarcely noticed their execution. To enumerate trials and executions would be impossible. One may suffice. A A paper containing a protest of the members of the ancient parliament against the government of Louis the Sixteenth was found in the chateau of Malesherbes. The aged judge himself scarcely knew of the document. Yet for this he and his whole family, sister, daughter, daughter's husband, De Chateaubriand and their child, were sent in one cart to the guillotine. About the same time was executed Lavoisier, the judge of the revolutionary tribunal declaring that the republic had no need of chemists. Of philosophers still less. Condorcet, proscribed for having written against a constitution which the government itself set aside, anticipated the execution by taking poison. St. Just at the same time passed a decree proscribing, not only all nobles and strangers, * Montgaillard. XLI. but all who were connected with them. "A country CHAP. must sweat its aristocracy," said Collot, "in order to be in health." Another decree abolished the revolutionary armies, and limited the provisional committees, which were subjected to the several committees in the capital now made to replace the different ministries. Robespierre's popularity, as well as Collot's, was augmented at this time by a supposed attempt to assassinate him. A young woman who demanded to see him was searched, and two knives found upon her. This was enough to awaken the sympathy of the populace for Robespierre. The attempt on Collot was more serious. A man named Arcueil fired at him two shots on his own staircase, No. 4, Rue Favart, and Collot only saved himself by a struggle and calling for assistance. Robespierre celebrated his triumph in his own fashion. He obtained a decree of the convention dethroning the goddess of Reason, and proclaiming in her stead the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. For the celebration of such a religion there needed neither priests nor temples. But an inaugural fête was necessary. The fanatic David undertook to regulate it. On the 3rd of June a large amphitheatre in the gardens of the Tuileries received the convention to witness its president Robespierre setting fire to certain statues, symbolical of crime. They were soon in a blaze, which not only consumed them, but blackened the statue of Wisdom. The guillotine was present in the distance, but concealed by flags and ribbons. muring, however, in the procession. the principal figure in the one which Tuileries to the Champ de Mars. dressed, and carried a nosegay as large as himself. There was no reason why his heading such a procession, as president of the assembly, and however magnificently clad, should have stirred the jealousy of his colleagues. But some of them, it is alleged, were greatly humiliated There was mur- |