always spoke of the deputy of Arras with esteem:-"M. de Robespierre, the only deputy who appears learned in great principles, and perhaps the only patriot who sits in the senate." They met with affected politeness on both sides. Robespierre hid nothing. After having praised the motives which incited Marat to action, he ended by warmly reproaching him for the excesses of his sheet, excesses which may obscure, in the eyes of some people, the services rendered by him to the cause of the republic. "There escape you," he said, "here and there certain words which come, I wish to think, from a good intention, but which nevertheless very much compromise our cause. I must beg of you to calm these immoderate angers, which allow your enemies fair opportunity to calumniate your heart."

"You must know," replied Marat, standing proudly erect, "that the influence of my sheet comes from these excesses-from the audace with which I dash under foot all human respect. From the effusion of my soul-from the impulse of my heart-from my violent exclamations against despotism-from my impetuous sallies-from my dolorous accents-from my cries of indignation, fury, and despair. These cries of alarm, these tocsins sounded, which you take for words in the air, are the naïve expressions of my sentiments-the natural sounds which agitate my heart."

"But," replied Robespierre, "you will confess that, in professing to serve the cause of the people, you have exclaimed sometimes in the name of liberty, in favour of measures opposed to liberty itself."

"What say you about liberty? Five hundred spies seek for me night and day! If they discover me, and hold me, they will cast me into a burning furnace, and I shall die victim of that liberty you accuse me of attacking. God of battles, if I have desired for one instant to seize your sword, it was but to restore, for the poor, the holy laws of nature. Believe me, our simple mission is to make men try new destinies. That which we do we are divinely impelled to do, and our Revolution is but a series, ever continued, of miracles. Each age has its current of ideas, which can neither be turned aside nor dried up: when these currents meet with obstacles, there is a struggle, and thronessociety-the whole part is swept away by an irresistible force. That is the whole history of our revolution. There are moments, I confess, when in the midst of the perils and difficulties of a state of agitation, I myself regret the ancient regime; but we must submit to the process of a renewal. We shall rather bring the sea back upon the beach it has deserted, than time back on man and the institutions he has given up. Since the constituents of '89 have provoked and commenced the Revolution, it must be carried on and accomplished at any price. They began it amid festivities and joyful embraces, we will conclude it in blood and in tears; such is the law. Revolutions are like aspics, their sting is in their tail. We may be shattered during our labours: but what matter? We labour, and our sons alone will reap the fruit of our labours and our sweats. The present generation must disappear. Free men are not made with ancient masters and old slaves. As the lover of a corrupt woman cannot appreciate a good one, so the lover of the oppressive regime could neither love nor recognise the nature of a free and reasonable regime."

Robespierre listened with terror: he became pale, and was for some time

silent.

"You are, then," said he at last, "for measures of blood? If you pretend to strike down all those who inflicted the yoke, and all those who bore it, the half of France would perish."

"You know," replied Marat, "that our revolution is surrounded by obstacles and by resistance; in a calm time, and when the reigning system is well seated, the disasters may be brought back by patience, by moderation, and they will be attached to the constitution by seeing the benefits which arise from it; but in the midst of faction, of civil wars, and the principles of ruin which menace on every side our growing liberty, we have neither the time nor the

leisure to act thus. We must crush all who resist, and answer war by war. Baited, bit in the flower, covered with dust and wounds, our revolution is the wild boar pursued by the pack of hounds; let those who stay or resist take the consequence. Revolutions begin by the war and finish by the sword. I did not myself foresee in '89 that we should be forced to cut off heads; but that was error and blindness. Every revolution creates among those whose ancient privileges are disturbed irreconcilable hatreds. A struggle begins, a struggle to the death, in which the new government must strike or be struck down. Conquered or cashiered on one point, our enemies show themselves on another. To get rid of them they must be destroyed. You know all this as well as I do, but you dare not avow them."

Robespierre was silent.

"No revolution," continued Marat, "will be more economical than ours of the blood of the people. We war not-we are warred against. The holy epidemic of liberty gains everywhere in all haste; it is that which will deliver us from all our enemies by exalting all thrones, and making servitude disappear. This is better than cannon. We are hard but to the enemy from within, because with these we can neither hope for amnesty or treaty. They must fall under our blows or we must fall under theirs. If we miss them they will not miss us. But, once more, this state of violence cannot last; it is the passage from the ancient to the new regime. Our principles will soon make of all Frenchmen children of the same family; they will re-unite all hearts, confound interests, and bring together all the scattered members: then will be formed a new spectacle, unknown unto this day, and finer than ever the sun illumined before. I am represented as an agitator and disturber. The friend of the people, on the contrary, is not less an enemy of licence than he is passionately attached to order, peace, and justice. But as long as the revolution is not accomplished, I look upon it as a duty to excite the people, and to keep them awake against the perfidy of her ancient rulers. Monarchy tries to raise its head triumphant under new forms and new disguises; I see Louis XVI. behind the Girondins. I am accused of flattering the populace, and of descending to its caprices, in order the better to carry out my will. Falsehood! Read my paper, and you will see how I treat, on the contrary, that embittered and restless portion of the people called the populace. Ifl have sometimes used them, it is because in revolutions they are wanted to stir up the masses. Bread is not made without leaven. Besides, it is not the government of one class of Frenchmen which I wish to establish, it is the government of all. I believe that attached to our liberty is that of all the people of the earth, who are our brothers. Do not be surprised if I am angry against those who would oppose this noble design, and who retard by their plots the reign of justice. This reign must come as I must perish. Thence these words in the air, these transports of indignation which you blame --but which will always be drawn from me by the picture of the miseries of the human race, and by the sentiment of its oppression. I am not one of those icy souls who see others suffer without being nerved; such scenes enrage me so my anger knows no bounds. I then cry, Avenge yourself, my friends,— avenge yourselves! Kill and burn, and stop not until the whole human race is delivered from its executioners!"

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Robespierre retired from the conversation terrified, alarmed, horror-struck. But he wanted power to crush the semi-madman, Marat, while he also unfortunately wanted courage to denounce him. Esquiros thus explains the difference of these two men :

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Robespierre, firm, pure, convinced, but cold, wished the triumphs of the Revolution by means less prompt than the Ami du Peuple. These tempestuous bursts alarmed him. This bold profession of faith retarded, according to him, the success of their cause. These conductors of public opinion only differed, however, as to the means to be employed to regenerate the French nation, and through them the whole human race. The life and profession of war leave strong traces on their ideas. Robespierre treated the Revolution like a speech

Marat as an experiment. The lawyer saw in the people a client to defend; the doctor looked upon the social body as a sick person wanting a vein opened.” The results of this interview were serious. Robespierre at the Jacobins repelled all connivance with Marat, whose dangerous zeal and extravagances he blamed. Marat disavowed, on the other side, Robespierre as his dictator. "I declare," wrote he in his paper, "that Robespierre has no influence over my pen, though it has often been used to render him justice; an interview I have just had with him confirms me in my opinion that he unites the lights of a wise senator to the integrity of a good man, but that he wants both the views and audacity of a statesman."

Robespierre was scarcely yet a republican. He cared little for form so long as he had the reality. He writes thus in a letter to the people :—

“I have not partaken the general fear which the name of king inspires. So that the nation be put in its place, and that there be a free flight for patriotism, which the nature of our revolution has created, I do not fear royalty, nor even the hereditary existence of royal functions in the same family."

The Girondins were, however, hot republicans. Esquiros thus sketches the opposition of Robespierre to this party:

"The man who was to combat the opinion of Brissot was Robespierre; suspicious probity beside cynicism masked by clever pride. Robespierre, who since the closing of the Constituante had made a journey to Arras, came back with a reputation increased by his absence. Intrepid and immoveable in his ideas, he was ready to seal with his blood the happiness of all. The Montagnards were at this period men of peace. Liberty is an idea-war is a fact, and a brutal fact. They declared against war. These men of inspiration had faith in the popular sentiment, which upsets the wisdom of sages, which changes light into darkness and darkness into light.

Worthless in character, an ex-spy, an immoral writer, he stood no chance against Robespierre. But such were the Gironde, so much lauded-Brissot an intriguer, Petion a hypocrite, Domouries a traitor, Louset a debauched rake; such were the chiefs of this splendid party. They wanted war. Robespierre opposed it. Alone in the Jacobins, he contended against its follies and wickedness. Camille Desmoulins thus speaks of his courageous opposition of the French love of glory :

"The talent of Robespierre," writes Camille Desmoulins, “has risen to a pitch hopeless for his enemies and the enemies of liberty; he was sublime; he caused tears to be shed by all.”

Barrere on his death bed thus alludes to this period :—

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Robespierre had the temperament of great men, and posterity will give him this title. He was great when alive in the constituant assembly; he had courage to defend the sovereignty of the people; he was great when, later, in the assembly of the Jacobins, he alone balanced the whole force of the government, and stayed the decree of war against Germany.”

Again we admire Robespierre. The Girondins, like men insincere and unconvinced, attached great importance to forms. Pharisees of the Revolution, they adopted its outward form, and they exaggerated in everything. The bonnet rouge, so much talked of as the symbol of sans-culottism, was the precious invention of the Gironde. Brissot thus advocates it in his journal:

“It is priests and despots who introduced the triste uniform of hats, as also the ridiculous and servile ceremony of bowing, which degrades a man by making him bow before his fellow a bare and submissive head. Remark the difference between a bonnet and a chapeau. The one, triste, sad, monotonous, is the emblem of mourning and magisterial morosity; the other enlivens and opens the countenance, renders it more assured and free, covers the head without hiding it, lightens the natural dignity, and is susceptible of all kinds of improvements.”

In Paris, amid its mercurial population, a new fashion is always accepted. Everybody wore the bonnet rouge. Robespierre again resisted the general movement; he contended always against all exaggerations, false ideas, and puerile

innovations. He neither let his beard grow nor his nails, nor neglected his hair, nor wore hideous clothes by way of placarding his patriotism. He always took care of his hair, and his habiliments, without being of a very recherchée elegance, were always clean and decent. The fact is, Maximilian thought that the love of liberty was compatible with clean shirts. He accordingly always spoke against the bonnet rouge, which became soon the mere standard of a party, composed of the ultra-democrats or anarchists.

Again, when the Girondins called upon the people to arm themselves with pikes, Robespierre was in arms against them. "It is difficult to be astonished, if the Montagnards, who believe in humanity, in national unity, whose ideas were that citizens were of one and the same family, showed themselves indifferent to these puerilities. I speak of the fabrication of pikes. Too much iron must not be put into the hands of a multitude newly freed, for it is to be feared this ever will, sooner or later, be dipped in blood. The Girondins, stayed in their designs by the words or by the silence of Robespierre, ceased not to accuse his pride. But personal egotism, egotism of cant, such is the primitive rock met a little below the surface by those who take the trouble to sound the intentions of the Gironde. Sensation was their doctrine, nature was their God."

The great secret of the hate of the Gironde against Robespierre was that he was religious. Esquiros says "We have not sufficiently inquired why the man ended by effacing all the other figures of the Gironde of the mountain; eloquent Danton was like him, and so were the Gironde; patient, tenacious, inflexible, other men partook with him these qualities. No! if Robespierre held firm against all his enemies; if, overthrown by the slain, the mainmast of the republic was broken, it is because in him was the religious idea of the Revolution."

Robespierre saw the hand of God in everything. On one occasion he cried-"Let us fear to weary the goodness of Heaven, which until now has been obstinately bent on saving us, despite ourselves." This phrase caused him much abuse from the infidel Gironde.

Previous to the 10th of August—an insurrectionary movement, in which Robespierre had no hand-an attempt was made to place him at the head of the movement, which was thought necessary to stop the counter-revolutionary projects of the Court. It is thus related by Lamartine :

:

"Another attempt took place in the name of Robespierre, but without his knowledge, to rally the Marseillaise to his cause. Two of the confidants of Robespierre, Panis and Freron, his colleagues in the municipality, sent for Rebecqui and Barbaroux to the Hotel de Ville, under the pretext of giving to the Marseillaise battalions a barracks nearer to the centre of the revolutionary movements—at the Cordeliers. This offer was accepted. Panis, Freron, Serjent covered their thoughts in clouds. The people want a chief. Brissot aspires to dictatorship-Pethun possesses it without exercising it. He is too feeble a genius. He doubtless loves the revolution, but he wants impossibilities-legal revolutions! If his feebleness had not been violent, there would have been no result.'

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6

The next day Barbaroux went to Robespierre. The hot-headed young man of the south was struck with astonishment on entering the dwelling of the austere and cold philosopher. The personality of Robespierre, like a worship that he rendered to himself, appeared in everything, and was breathed forth even in the ornaments of his simple cabinet; everywhere his own image-in pencil, in pen and ink, or in marble. Robespierre did not go beyond general reflections on the march of the Revolution, on the acceleration which the Jacobins had given to the movement, on the imminence of an approaching crisis, and on the urgence there was to give it a centre-a soul-a chief, by investing a man with popular omnipotence.

"We wish not for a dictator any more than for a king,' said Rebecqui, brusquement.

"They thus parted. Panis accompanied the young Marseillaise, and said to Rebecqui, squeezing his hand

"You have ill understood; nothing was intended but a momentary and insurrectionary authority to direct and save the people, and not of a dictatorship. Robespierre is this man of the people.'

Except this conversation, provoked by the friends of Robespierre, unknown to him, and accepted by the Marseillaise chiefs, nothing indicates in Robespierre the premature ambition of dictatorship, nor even any direct participation in the movement of the 10th of August. The Republic was for him an ideal perspective in an ideal distance; the Regency was for him a reign of feebleness and civil trouble; the Duke of Orleans he hated, as a crowned intriguer; the constitution of 1781, loyally executed, would have sufficed, without the treachery of the Court. The dictatorship he desired was the dictatorship of public opinion-the sovereignty of his words.

Shortly after, the 10th of August came, and the monarchy virtually fell. Whatever may have been the secret sentiments of Robespierre, he had no hand in this event. Shortly after, Danton, Hebert, and others organised the atrocious massacres in the prisons, known as the Massacres of September. This bloody event, the most awful in the whole Revolution, is almost inexplicable. Two hundred men terrified all Paris; entered the prisons, and killed and slaughtered all therein, without let or hindrance. Marat himself never was guilty of a worse atrocity, which rests as the great blood-stain of the Revolution. A careful examination of history leaves no doubt as to its author. Danton was the man, the most dangerous of the revolutionists, because, while using the people, he had neither faith in them, nor cared for them. In fact, he never denied his guilt. Sometimes, after being accused of the massacre, he accepted the responsibility, and said, "I looked my crime in the face, and I did it."

To understand another part of this tragedy, we must quote a scene from the admirable pages of Lamartine:—

"As to the part which Robespierre played during these days, it was the same which he affected in all the crises. In the question of war, from the 20th of June to the 10th of August, he did not act he blamed-but he left the event to take its course; and when accomplished, he accepted it as a step in the Revolution, upon which he had no occasion to return. He did not wish to give to others an advantage in popularity-he washed his hands from this blood, and he allowed it to be shed. But his credit, inferior to that of Danton and of Marat, in the Council of the Commune, did not then afford the power of hindering anything. He was, like Pethion, in the shade. These men, as also the Girondins, saw the projects of Marat and Danton transpire; unable to prevent them, they affected to be ignorant of them. A fact, recently revealed by a confidant of Robespierre and of Saint Just, outlives these unfortunate times, and proves the justness of those conjectures on the part of Robespierre in the executions of the days of September.

"At that time Robespierre and the young Saint Just-the one already celebrated, the other as yet obscure-lived in that state of familiarity which often unites the master and disciple. Saint Just, already mixed in the movement of the times, followed and outran with his eye the crises of the Revolution with the cold impassibility of a logic which hardens the heart as a system, and renders it cruel as an abstraction. Politics were to his eyes a deadly battle, and the conquered were the victims. On the 2nd of September, at eight o'clock in the evening, Robespierre and Saint Just left the Jacobins together, harrassed with fatigue of body and mind, by a day entirely passed in the tumult of deliberations, and pregnant of such a terrible night.

"Saint Just lodged in a little furnished room in the Rue Saint Anne, not far from the house of Duplay, the joiner, inhabited by Robespierre. In talking over the events of the day, and the threatening signs for the morrow, the two friends arrived at the door of Saint Just's house. Robespierre, absorbed in thought, ascended the stair, to continue the conversation, until, arriving at the