In the
night the armed police came round to the Passage du Commerce; one part of the
patrol grounded their muskets and halted at the exits of the street, the other
entered the house.
Desmoulins
heard the butts falling together on the flagstones, and the little clink of
metal which announces soldiery; he turned to his wife and said, “They have come
to arrest me.” And she held to him till she fainted and was carried away.
Danton, in his study alone, met the arrest without words. There is hardly a
step in the tragedy that follows which is not marked by his comment, always
just, sometimes violent; but the actual falling of the blow led to no word.
Words were weapons with him, and he was not one to strike before he had put up
his guard.
They
were taken to the Luxembourg, very close by, a little up the hill. We have the
story of how Danton came with his ample, firm presence into the hall of the
prison, and met, almost the first of his fellow-prisoners, Thomas Paine. The
author of “The Rights of Man” stepped up to him, doubtless to address him in
bad French.[1]
Danton forestalled him in the English of which he was a fair master.
"Mr.
Paine,” he said, “you have had the happiness of pleading in your country a
cause which I shall no longer plead in mine.” He remembered Paine’s sane and
moderate view on the occasion of the king’s trial, and lie envied one whose
private freedom had remained untrammelled with the bonds of office; who had
never been forced to a 2nd of June, nor had to keep to an intimate conversation
his fears for the Girondins. Then he added that if they sent him to the
scaffold he would go gaily, And he did. There was the Frenchman contrasted with
his English friend.
Beaulieu,
who heard him, tells us that he also turned to the prisoners about him and
said, “Gentlemen, I had hoped to have you out of this, and here I am myself; I
can see no issue.”
So the
prisoners came in, anxiously watched by reactionaries, to whom, as to many of
our modern scribblers, one leader of the Revolution is as good as
another—Lacroix, Westermann (the strong soldier with his huge frame overtopping
even Danton’s), and Desmoulins. As they passed to their separate cells, for it
was determined to prevent their communication, a little spirit of the old evil[2]
used the powerful venom of aristocracy, the unanswerable repartee of rank, and
looking Lacroix up and down, said, “I could make a fine coachman of that
fellow.” He and his like would have ruined France for the sake of turning those
words into action.
Till the
dawn of the 11th Germinal broke, they were kept in their separate rooms. But
the place was not built for a prison. Lacroix and Danton in neighbouring rooms
could talk by raising their voices, and we have of their conversation this
fragment. Lacroix said, “Had I ever dreamt of this I could have forestalled it.”
And Danton’s reply, with just that point of fatalism which had forbidden him to
be ambitious, answered, “I knew it;” he had known it all that night.
There
was a force stronger than love—private and public fear. It is a folly to
ridicule, or even to misunderstand that fear. The possessions, the families of
many, the newly-acquired dignity of all, above everything, the new nation had
been jeopardised how many times by a popular idol turned untrue. The songs of
1790 were all for Louis, many praised Bailly; what a place once had Lafayette !
Who had a word to say against Dumouriez eighteen months before? The victories
had just begun—barely enough to make men hesitate about the Terror. The “Vieux
Cordelier” had led, not followed opinion, as it was just that the great centre
of energy should lead and not follow the time. And, men would say, how do we
know why he has been arrested, or at whose voice? How can we tell where the
sure compass of right, our Robespierre, stands in the matter? and so forth.
Nothing then was done; but Paris very nearly moved.
There
were thus two gathering forces; one vague and large, one small but ordered, and
on the result of their shock hung the life of Danton—may one say (knowing the
future) the life of the Republic?
Now the
struggle with Europe had taught the Committee a principal lesson. Perhaps one
should add that the exuberant fighting power of the nation and of the age had
forced the Committee to a certain method, apparent in the armies, in the
measures, in the speeches: it was the method of detecting at once the weakest
spot in the opposing line, and of abandoning everything for the purpose of
concentrating all its strength and charging home. So their descendants to-day
in their new army practise the marvellous massing of artillery which you may
watch at autumn in the manoeuvres.
What was
the opposing line? A vague ill-ordered crowd—Paris; the undisciplined
Convention, lacking leaders, ignorant of party rule. Where was its weakness? In
the want of initiative, in the fact that, till some one spoke, no one could be
sure of the strength of the corporate feeling. Also, on account of the public
doubt, during that time men were grains of dust; but the dust was like powder,
and speech was always the spark which permitted the affinities of that powder
to meet in fierce unity and power. A sudden blow had to be struck and the fire
stamped out before it had gathered power; this is how the check was given.
* * * * * *
In the
morning of the 12th Germinal the Convention met, and each man looked at his
neighbour, and then, as though afraid, let his eyes wander to see if others
thought as he did. At last one man dared to speak. It was Legendre the butcher;[3]
he vacillated later before a mixture of deceit in others and of doubt in
himself, but it should be remembered to his honour that he nearly saved the
Revolution by an honest word. “Let Danton be heard at the bar of the
Convention,” was his frank demand; common-sense enough, but it fatally opened
his guard, and gave an opportunity to the thrusts most dangerous in the year
II.—an accusation of desiring privilege, and an accusation of weakening that
government which was visibly saving the state on the frontiers.
Tallien
was President that day, and he gave the reply to Robespierre. Now Robespierre
was no good fencer. The supreme feint, the final disarming of opinion, was left
to an abler man. He had gone home from the Committee to Duplay’s house in the
early morning; a monomaniac hardly needing sleep, he reappeared at the early
meeting of the Convention. But, poor debater as he was, he could take advantage
of so easy an opportunity. In a speech which was twice applauded, he asserted
that Legendre had demanded a privilege. He struck the note which above all
others dominated those minds. “Are we here to defend principles or men? Give
the right of speech to Danton, and you give rein to an extraordinary talent,
you confuse the issue with a hundred memories, you permit the bias of
friendship. Let the man defend himself by proofs and witnesses, not by
eloquence and sentiment.” Yet he did not add—perhaps he hardly knew that the
memories and friendship would but have balanced a direct enmity, and that
witnesses and proofs would be denied. Again he used that argument of
government—had not they saved France? were they not the head of the police? did
not they know in the past what they were doing? He assured them that a little
waiting would produce conviction in them also. It did not, but time was gained,
already half the Convention doubted.
Legendre,
bewildered, faltered a reply; he admitted error, and begged Robespierre not to
misunderstand. He could have answered for Danton as for himself, but the
tribunal was of course to be trusted. It was almost an apology.
On that
changing, doubtful opinion came with the force of a steel mould the hard, high
voice of St. Just.
St. Just
spoke rarely. There has been mention in an earlier part of this book of the
speech against the Girondins. There will be mention again of a vigorous and a
nearly successful attempt to save Robespierre. That he should have been given
the task of defending the Committee’s action that day is a singular proof of the
grip which they had of the circumstances. Barrère could never have convinced an
unsympathetic public opinion. Robespierre could meet a rising enthusiasm with
nothing but dry and accurate phrases. But St. Just had the flame of his youth
and of his energy, and his soul lived in his mouth.
The
report, even as we read it, has eloquence. Coming from him then, with his
extreme beauty, his upright and determined bearing, it turned the scale. The
note of the argument was as ably chosen as could be; moreover it represented
without question the attitude of his own mind: it was this. “The last of the
factions has to be destroyed; only one obstacle stands between you and the
appreciation of the Republic.[4]
Time and again we have acted suddenly, but time and again we have acted well
and on sufficient reasons so it is now. If you save Danton you save a
personality something you have known and admired; you pay respect to individual
talent, but you ruin the attempt in which you have so nearly succeeded. For the
sate of a man you will sacrifice all the new liberty which you are giving to
the whole world.” There follows a passionate apostrophe in which he speaks to
Danton as though he stood before him, as striking as the parallel passage in
the fourth Catiline Oration.[5]
Had Danton been present he would have been a man against a boy: a loud and
strong voice, not violent in utterance, but powerful in phrase and in delivery,
a character impressing itself by sheer force of self upon vacillating opinion.
Had Danton spoken in reply, his hearers would have said with that moral
conviction which is stronger than proof, “This man is the chief lover of
France.”
But such
is rhetoric, its falsity and its success—the gaps of silence grew to a
convincing power. The accusations met with no reply; they remained the echo of
a living voice; the answers to them could be framed only in the silent minds of
the audience. The living voice won.
And
there was, as we have said, intense conviction to aid St. Just. He was a man
who would forget and would exaggerate with all the faults of passion, but he
believed the facts he gave. Not so Robespierre. Robespierre had furnished the
notes of St. Just’s report,[6]
and Robespierre must have known that he had twisted all to one end. Robespierre
was a man who was virtuous and true only to his ideal, not to his fellowmen.
Robespierre had not deceived himself as he wrote, but he had deceived St. Just,
and therefore the young “Archangel of Death” spoke with the added strength of
faith, than which nothing leaps more readily from the lips to the ears. Can we
doubt it? There is a phrase which convinces. When he ends by telling them what
it is they save by sacrificing one idol, when he describes the Republic, he
uses the phrase common to all apostolates, the superb “les mots que nous avons
dits ne seront jamais perdus sur la terre"—the things which they had said
would never be lost on earth.
It
ended. No one voted; the demand of the Committee passed without a murmur. The
Convention was never again its own mistress; it had silenced and condemned
itself.[7]
Meanwhile
at the Luxembourg the magistrate Dérizot was making the preparations for the
trial. Each prisoner was asked the formal question of his guilt, and each
replied in a single negative, but Danton added that he would die a Republican,
and to the question of their defence replied that he would plead his own cause.
Then, at half-past eleven they were transferred to the Conciergerie.
From
that moment his position becomes the attitude of the man fighting, as we have known
it in the crisis of August 1792 and of the calling up of the armies. Ready as
he had always been to see the real rather than the imaginary conditions, he
recognised death with one chance only of escape. He knew far better than did
poor Desmoulins the power of a State’s machinery; he felt its grasp and doubted
of any issue. The people, for Desmoulins, were the delegators of power; for
Danton the people were those who should, but who did not rule. To live again
and enter the arena and save the life of the Republic the people must hear his
voice, or else the fact of government would be more strong than all the rights
and written justice in the world.
He was
like a man whose enemy stands before him, and who sees at his own side, passive
and bewildered, a strong but foolish ally. His ally was the people, his enemy
was Death.
Therefore
we have of his words and actions for the next four days two kinds: those
addressed to death and those to his ally. Where he desires to touch the spirit
of the crowd—in what was for their ears—we have the just, practical, and
eloquent man apologising for over-vehemence, saying what should strike hardest
home—an orator, but an orator who certainly uses legitimate weapons.
But
there is another side. In much that he said in prison, in all that he said on
his way to the scaffold, he is simply speaking to Death and defying him. The
inmost thing in a man, the stock of the race, appears without restraint; he
becomes the Gaul. That most un-northern habit of defiance, especially of defiance
to the inevitable and to the strongest, the custom of his race and their
salvation, grows on his lips.
He
insults Death, he jests; his language, never chaste or self-conscious, takes on
the laughter of the Rabelaisian, and (true Rabelaisian again) he wraps up in
half-a-dozen words the whole of a situation.
Thus we
see him leaning against the window of his prison and calling to Westermann in
the next cell, “Oh ! if I could leave my legs to Couthon[8]
and my virility to Robespierre, things might still go on.” And again when
Lacroiz said, “I will cut my own hair at the neck, so that Sanson the
executioner shall not meddle with it,” Danton replied, “Yet will Sanson
intermeddle with the vertebrae of your neck.” So he meets death with a broad
torrent of words; and that a civilisation accustomed rather to reticence should
know what this meant in him, my readers must note his powerful asides to
Desmoulins and to Hérault, coinciding with the fearful pun in which he tried to
raise the drooping courage of D’Eglantine.
Also in
his prison this direct growth of the soil of France “talked often of the fields
and of rivers.” Shakespeare should have given us the death scenes of so much
energy, defiance, coarseness, affection, and great courage.
In the
Conciergerie they spent the rest of the day waiting for the trial, and this
time Danton was next to “Westermann, to whom and to Desmoulins he said, “We
must say nothing save before the Committees or at the trial.” It was his plan
to move the people by a public defence, but his enemies in power had formed a
counterplan, and, as we shall see, forestalled him.
Desmoulins,
“the flower that grew on Danton,” was still bewildered. So he remained to the
end; at the foot of the scaffold he could not understand. “If I could only have
written a No, VII. I would have turned the tables."[9]
“It is a duel of Commodus; they have the lance and I have not even a reed.” To
that man, his equal in years,[10]
but a boy compared with him in spirit, Danton had always shown, and now
continued to show, a peculiar affection. He treated him like a younger brother,
and never made him suffer those violent truths with which all France and most
of his friends were familiar in his mouth. So now, and in the trial, and on the
way to the scaffold, his one attempt was to calm the bitter violence and
outburst of Camille.
There
are two phrases of Danton’s which have been noted on this first day passed at
the Conciergerie, and which cannot be omitted, though in form they have not his
diction, yet in spirit they might be his; they are recollections presumably of
something of greater length called to Westermann.
The
first: “On such a day[11]
I demanded the institution of the Revolutionary tribunal. I ask pardon of God
and of man.”
The
second: “I am leaving everything at sixes and sevens; one had better be a poor
fisherman than meddle with the art of governing men.” There you have the real
Danton—a reminiscence of some strong and passionate utterance put into this
undantonesque and proverbial form. A real sentiment of his all of him; careless
of life, intense upon the interests of life, above all upon the future of the
Revolution and of France, knowing the helpless inferiority of the men he left
behind. And in the close of the phrase it is also he; it is the spirit of great
weariness which had twice touched him, as sleep an athlete after a day of
games. It was soon to take the form of a noble sentence: “Nous avons assez
servi—allons dormir.”
On the
13th (April 2, 1794), about ten in the morning, they were led before the
tribunal
The
trial began.
It must
not be imagined that the Dantonists alone came before the tribunal to answer
for their particular policy. There had originated under Robespierre (and later when
he alone was the master it was to be terribly abused) the practice of confusing
the issues. Three groups at least were tried together, and the Moderates sat
between two thieves—for D’Eglantine on a charge of embezzlement alone, Guzman,
the Freys as common thieves and spies to the Republic, were associated on the
same bench. Fourteen in all, they sat in the following order: Chabot, Bazire,
Fabre, Lacroix, Danton, Delaunay, Héault, Desmoulins, Guzman, Diederichsen,
Phillippeaux, D’Espagnac, and the two Freys. D’Eglantine occupied “the
arm-chair,” and it will be seen that the five—the Moderates—were
carefully scattered.
The
policy was a deliberate one; it was undertaken with the object of prejudicing
public opinion against the accused. Nor was it permitted to each group to be
separate in accusation and in its method of defence. They were carefully linked
to each other by men accused of two out of the three crimes.
Herman
was president of the tribunal, and sat facing the prisoners; on either side of
him were Masson-Denizot, Foucault and Bravé, the assistant-judges. They say
that Voullaud and Vadier, of the lower committee, appeared behind the bench to
watch the enemies whom they had caught in the net. Seven jurors were in the box
to the judges’ left, by name Renaudin (whom Desmoulins challenged in vain),
Desboisseaux, Trinchard, Dix-Aout, Lumière, Ganney, Souberbielle,[12]
and to these we must add Topino-Lebrun, whose notes form by far the most vivid
fragment by which we may reconstruct the scene. The jury of course was packed.[13]
It was part of the theory of the Revolutionary Government that no chance
element should mar its absolute dictatorship. It was practically a court of
judges, absolute, and without division of powers.
At a
table between the President and the prisoners sat Fouquier-Tinville, the public
prosecutor; and finally, on the judges’ right was the open part of the court
and the door to the witnesses’ room.
Here was
a new trial with a great and definite chance of acquittal, a scene the like of
which had not been seen for a year, nor would be seen again in that room. The
men on the prisoners’ bench had been the masters, one of them the creator, of
the court which tried them; they were evidently greater and more powerful than
their judges, and had behind them an immense though informal weight of
popularity. They were public men of the first rank; their judges and the public
prosecutor were known to be merely the creatures of a small committee. More
than this, it was common talk that the Convention might yet change its mind,
and even among the jury it was certain that discussion would arise.
By the
evidence of a curious relic we know that the Committee actually feared a decree
or a coup-de-main which would hare destroyed their power. This note remains in
the archives, a memorandum of a decision arrived at in the Committee on the
early morning of the 13th or late in the night of the 12th.
“Henriot to be written to, to tell him to issue an order that the President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal are not to be arrested”
Then in
another hand:
“Get four members to sign this.”
Finally,
the memorandum is endorsed in yet another hand:
“13th Germinal.—A policeman took this the same day.” [14]
It will
thus be seen that the Committee was by no means sure of its ground. It had
indeed procured through St. Just the decree preventing Danton from pleading at
the bar of the Convention and permitting his trial, but it would require the
most careful manoeuvring upon their part to carry through such an affair. As we
shall see, they just—and only just—succeeded.
The
whole of the first day (the 13th Germinal, 2nd of April 1794) was passed in the
formal questions and in the reading of accusations. Camille, on being asked his
age and dwelling, made the blasphemous and striking answer which satisfied the
dramatic sense, but was not a true reply to the main question.
Danton
gave the reply so often quoted: “I am Danton, not unknown among the
revolutionaries. I shall be living nowhere soon, but you will find my name in
Walhalla.” The other answers, save that of Hérault, attempted no phrases.
Yet
Guzman would have made more point of his assertion if he had chosen that moment
to say, “I am Guzman, a grandee of Spain, who came to France to taste liberty,
but was arrested for theft;” while the two Freys missed an historic occasion in
not replying, “We are Julius and Emanuel Frey, sometime nobles of the Empire
under the title of Von Schonfeld, now plain Jews employed by the Emperor as
spies.”
The
public prosecutor read the indictment. First at great length Amar’s report on
the India Company. The details of the accusations which cost Fabre his life
need not be entered into here. Suffice it to say that it was an indictment for
corruption, for having suppressed or altered for money the decree of the
Convention in the autumn before, and being accomplice in the extra gains which
this had made possible—one of those wretched businesses with which Panama and
South Africa have deluged modern France and England. It is an example of the
methods of the tribunal that Fouquier managed to drag in Desmoulins’s name
because he had once said, “People complain of not being able to make money now,
yet I make it easily enough.”
The
second group, the Freys, Guzman, the unfrocked priest D’Espagnac, and
Diederichsen the Dane, were accused of being foreigners working against the
success of the French armies, and at the same time lining their pockets. In the
case of three of them the accusation was probably true. It was the more readily
believed from the foreign origins of the accused, for France was full of spies,
while the name of a certain contumacious Baron de Bartz made this list sound
the more probable.
Finally,
the small group at which they were really aiming (whose members they had
already mixed up with the thieves) was indicted on nothing more particular than
the report of St. Just—virtually, that is, on Robespierre’s notes. Danton had
served the King, had drawn the people into the place where they were massacred
in July 1791, did not do his duty on the 10th of August, and so forth—a vapid
useless summary of impossible things in which no one but perhaps St. Just and a
group of fanatics believed. With that the day ended, and they were taken back
to prison.
On the next
day, the 14th Germinal (3rd of April 1794), Westermann, who, though already
arrested, had only been voted upon in Parliament the day before, appeared on
the prisoners’ bench, and sat at the end after Emanuel Frey. He was the last
and not the least noble of the Dantonists, with his great stature, his clumsy
intellect, and his loyal Teutonic blood.
“Who are
you?” they said. “I am Westermann. Show me to the people, I was a soldier at
sixteen, and have been a councillor of Strasbourg. I have seven wounds in
front, and I was never stabbed in the back till now.”
This was
the man who had led the 10th of August, and who had dared, in his bluff nature,
to parley with the Swiss who spoke his language.
It was
after some little time pased in the interrogation of the prisoners who had been
arrested for fraud, especially of D’Espagnac, that the judge turned to Danton.
In the
debate and cross-questioning that followed we must depend mainly upon the notes
of Lebrun,[15] for they
are more living, although they are more disconnected, than the official report.
We discover in them the passionate series of outbursts, but a series which one
must believe to have had a definite purpose. There was neither hope of
convincing the tribunal nor of presenting a legal argument with effect. What
Danton was trying to do in this court, which was not occupied with a trial, but
merely in a process of condemnation, was to use it as a rostrum from which he
could address the people, the general public, upon whose insurrection he
depended. He perhaps depended also on the jury, for, carefully chosen as they
were, they yet might be moved by a man who had never failed to convince by his
extraordinary power of language. He carries himself exactly as though he were
technically what he is in fact—a prisoner before an informal group of
executioners, who appeals for justice to the crowd.
He
pointed at Cambon, who had sat by him on the Committee, and said, “Come now,
Cambon, do you think we are conspirators? Look, he is laughing; he believes no
such thing.” Then he turned, laughing himself, to the jury and said, “Write
down in your notes that he laughed.”
Again,
he uses phrases like these: “We are here for a form, but if we are to have full
liberty to speak, and if the French people is what it should be, it will be my
business later to ask their pardon for my accusers.” To which Camille answered,
“Oh, we shall be allowed to speak, and that is all we want,” and the group of
Indulgents laughed heartily.
It was
just after this that he began that great harangue in answer to the questions of
the judge, an effort whose tone reaches to this day. It is, perhaps, the most
striking example of a personal appeal that can be discovered. The opportunities
for such are rare, for in the vast majority of historical cases where a man has
pleaded for his life, it has either been before a well-organised court, or
before a small number of determined enemies, or by the lips of one who was paid
for his work and who ignored the art of political oratory. The unique conditions
of the French Revolution made such a scene possible, perhaps for the only time
in history.
The day,
early as was the season, was warm, the windows of the court, that looked upon
the Seine, were open, and through the wide doors pressed the head of a great
crowd. This crowd stretched out along the corridor, along the quays, across the
Pont Neuf, and even to the other side of the river. Every sentence that told
was repeated from mouth to mouth, and the murmurs of the crowd proved how
closely the great tribune was followed. In the attitude which had commanded the
attention of his opponents when he presented the first deputation from Paris
three years before, and that had made him so striking a figure during the
stormy months of 1793, he launched the phrases that were destined for Paris and
not for his judges. His loud voice (the thing appears incredible, but it is
true) vibrating through the hall and lifted to the tones that had made him the
orator of the open spaces, rang out and was heard beyond the river.
“You say
that I have been paid, but I tell you that men made as I am cannot be paid. And
I put against your accusation—of which you cannot furnish a proof nor the hint
of a proof, nor the shadow nor the beginning of a witness—the whole of my
revolutionary career. It was I who from the Jacobins kept Mirabeau at Paris. I
have served long enough, and my life is a burden to me, but I will defend
myself by telling you what I have done. It was I who made the pikes rise
suddenly on the 20th of June and prevented the King’s voyage to St. Cloud. The
day after the massacre of the Champ de Mars a warrant was out for my arrest.
Men were sent to kill me at Arcis, but my people came and defended me. I had to
fly to London, and I came back, as you all know, the moment Garran was elected.
Do you not remember me at the Jacobins, and how I asked for the Republic? It
was I who knew that the court was eager for war. It was I, among others, who
denounced the policy of the war.”
Here a
sentence was heard: “What did you do against the Brissotins?”
Now
Danton had, as we know, done all in his power to save the men who hated him,
but whom he admired. It was no time for him to defend himself by an explanation
of this in the ears of the people who had never understood, as he had, the
height of the men who followed Vergnaud; but he said what was quite true: “I
told them that they were going to the scaffold. When I was a minister I said it
to Brissot before the whole cabinet.”
He might
have added that he had said to Guadet in the November woods on the night before
he left for the army, “You are headstrong, and it will be your doom.”
Then he
went back again to the list of his services. “It was I who prepared the 10th of
August. You say I went to Arcis. I admit it, and I am proud of it. I went there
to pass three days, to say good-bye to my mother, and to arrange my affairs,
because I was shortly to be in peril. I hardly slept that night. It was I that
had Mandat killed, because he had given the order to fire on the people. . . .
You are reproaching me with the friendship of Fabre D’Eglantine. He is still my
friend, and I still say that he is a good citizen as he sits here with me. You
have told me that my defence has been too violent, you have recalled to me the
revolutionary names, and you have told me that Marat when he appeared before
the tribunal might have served as my model. Well, with regard to those names
who were once my friends, I will tell you this: Marat had a character on fire
and unstable; Robespierre I have known as a man, above all, tenacious; but I—I
have served in my own fashion, and I would embrace my worst enemy for the sake
of the country, and I will give her my body if she needs the sacrifice.”
This
short and violent speech, which I have attempted to reproduce from the short,
disjointed, ill-spelt notes of Lebrun, hit the mark The crowd, the unstable
crowd, which he contemned as he passed to the guillotine, moved like water
under a strong wind; and his second object also was reached, for the tribunal
grew afraid. These phrases would soon be repeated in the Convention, and no
means had been taken to silence that terrible voice. The President of the court
said to him that it was the part of an accused man to defend himself with
proofs and not with rhetoric. He parried that also with remarkable skill,
saying in a much quieter tone which all his friends (they were now growing in
number) immediately noted: “That a man should be violent is wrong in him I
know, unless it is for the public good, and such a violence has often been
mine. If I exceeded now, it was because I found myself accused with such
intolerable injustice.” He raised his voice somewhat again with the words, “But
as for you, St. Just, you will have to answer to posterity,” and then was
silent.
When the
unhappy man who had taken upon his shoulders the vile duty of the political
work that day, when Herman was himself upon his trial, he said, “Remember that
this affair was out of the ordinary, and was a political trial,” when a voice
rose from the court, “There are no political trials under a Republic.” He would
have done well, obscure as he is before history, to have saved his own soul by
refusing a task which he knew to involve injustice from beginning to end.
It was
at the close of that day that three short notes passed between Herman and the
public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. Herman wrote, “In half an hour I shall
stop Danton’s defence. You must spin out some of the rest in detail.” Tinville
answered, “I have something more to say to Danton about Belgium;” and Herman
replied, “Do not bring it in with regard to any of the others.” This little
proof of villany, which has survived by so curious an accident (it is in the
Archives to-day),[16] closed the
proceedings of that hearing.
The next
day, the 15th of Germinal (4th April), Danton himself said little. It was given
over mainly to the examination of Desmoulins; and as with Danton it had been
rumours or opinions, so with Desmoulins only the vague sense of things he had
written were brought in to serve as evidence in this tragic farce.
Fouquier,
the distant cousin of Camille, to whom he owed the post in which he was earning
his bread by crime,[17]
tried to put something of complaint against the nation and of hatred to the
Republic into his reading of the Old Cordelier. Even in his thin unpleasant
voice there was only heard the noble phrase of Tacitus, and—it is a singular
example of what the tribunal had become—they dared not continue the quotation
because every word roused the people in the court. But Camille, so great with
the pen, had nothing of the majesty or the strength of Danton. His defence was
a weak, disconnected excuse, and, like all men who are insufficient to
themselves, he was inconsistent.
Hérault
made on that same day a far finer reply. Noble by birth, holding by his
traditions and memories to that society which he himself had helped to destroy,
and of which Talleyrand has said, “Those who have not known it have not lived;”
accustomed from his very first youth to prominence in his profession and to the
favour of the court, he remained to the last full of contempt for so much
squalor, and he veiled his eyes with pride.
“I
understand nothing of this topsy-turvydom. I was a diplomat, and I made the
neutrality of Switzerland, so saving 60,000 men to the Republic. As for the
priest you talk about, who was guillotined in my absence at Troyes, I knew him
well. He was a Canon, if I remember, and by no means a reactionary. You are probably
joking about it. It is true he had not taken the oath, but he was a good man;
he helped me, and I am not ashamed of my friendship. I will tell you something
more. On the 14th of July two men were killed, one on either side of me.” He
might have added, “I was the second man to scale the Towers.”
It was
not until the day’s proceedings had been drawn out for a considerable time that
a sentence was spoken, the full import of which was not understood at the time,
but which was, as a fact, the first step in those four months of
irresponsibility and crime which are associated with the name of Robespierre,
and which hang like a weight around the neck of the French nation. Lacroix had
just said with a touch of legal phraseology, “I must insist that the witnesses
whom I have demanded should be subpoenaed, and if there is any difficulty about
this, I formally demand that the Convention shall be consulted in the matter;” when
the public prosecutor answered, “It is high time that this part of the trial,
which has become a mere struggle, and which is a public scandal, should cease.
I am about to write to the Convention to hear what it has to say, and its
advice shall be exactly followed.”
Both the
public prosecutor and the judge signed the letter. The first draft which
Fouquier had drawn up was thought too strong, and it appears that Herman
revised it.[18] “Citoyens
Représentants, —There has been a storm in the hall since this day’s proceedings
began. The accused are calling for witnesses who are among your deputies. . . .
They are appealing to the people, saying that they will be refused. In spite of
the firmness of the president and of all the tribunal, they continue to protest
that they will not be silent until their witnesses are heard, unless by your
passing a special decree.” [This was false, and was the only part of the letter
calculated to impress the Parliament.] “We wish to hear your orders as to what
we shall do in the face of this demand; the procedure gives us no way by which
we can refuse them.”
But note
the way in which the letter was presented to a Parliament in which there yet
remained so much sympathy for the accused, and the way in which it was
received. St. Just appeared in the tribune with the letter in his hands, and,
instead of reading it, held it up before them and made this speech:—
“The
public prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal has sent to tell you that the
prisoners are in full revolt, and have interrupted the hearing, saying they
will not allow it to continue until the Convention has taken measures. You have
barely escaped from the greatest danger which has yet menaced our new liberty,
and this revolt in the very seat of justice, of men panic-stricken by the law,
shows what is in their minds. Their despair and their fury are a plain proof of
the hypocrisy which they showed in keeping a good face before you. Innocent men
do not revolt. Dillon, who ordered his army to march on Paris, has told us that
Desmoulins’s wife received money to help the plot. Our thanks are due to you
for having put us in the difficult and dangerous post that we occupy. Your
Committees will answer you by the most careful watching,” and so forth. When
the Convention had had laid before them every argument and every flattery which
could falsify their point of view, he proposed the decree that any prisoner who
should attempt to interrupt the course of justice by threats or revolt should
be outlawed.
As they
were about to vote, Billaud Varennes added his word, “I beg the Convention to
listen to a letter which the Committees have received from the police
concerning the conspirators, and their connection with the prisoners.” The
letter is not genuine. Even if it were, it depends entirely upon the word of
one obscure and untrustworthy man (Laflotte), but it did the work. The
Committees, as we know, were names to conjure with. Their secret debates, their
evident success, the fact that their members had been chosen for the very
purpose of guarding the interests of the Republic, all fatally told against the
prisoners. The decree passed without a vote. Robespierre asked that the letter
might be read in full court, and his demand was granted. It was from that
letter, from this obscure and uncertain origin, that there dated the legend of
the “conspiracy in the prisons” which was to cost the lives of so many
hundreds.
It was
at the very close of this day, the 4th of April, that the decree of the
Convention was brought back to the tribunal. Amar brought it and gave it to
Fouquier, saying, “Here is what you wanted.” Fouquier smiled and said, “We were
in great need of it.” It was read in the tribunal. When Camille heard the name
of his wife mentioned in connection with St. Just’s demand he cried out, “Will
they kill her too?” and David, who was sitting behind the judges, said, “We
hold them at last."[19]
The
fourth day, the 16th Germinal (5th April), the court met at half-past eight in
the morning, instead of at the ordinary hour of ten. Almost at once, before the
accused had time to begin their tactics of the day before, the decree was read.
The judge, relying on the law which had already been in operation against
others, and which gave the jury the right to say after three days whether they
were satisfied, turned to them, and they asked leave to deliberate.
Before
the prisoners had passed into the prison Desmoulins had found time to tear the
defence which he had written into small pieces, and to throw them at the feet
of the judge. Danton cried out, and checked himself in the middle of his
sentence. All save poor Camille had kept their self-control. He, however, clung
to the dock, determined on making some appeal to the people, or to the judges,
or to posterity. Danton, who calmed him a few hours later at the foot of the
scaffold, could do nothing with him then, and it was in the midst of a terrible
violence that the fifteen disappeared.
The
prisoners were taken back to the Conciergerie, but in their absence occurred a
scene which is among the most instructive of the close of the Revolution. One
of the jury could not bring himself to declare the guilt of men whom he knew to
be innocent. Another said to him, “This is not a trial; it is a sacrifice.
Danton and Robespierre cannot exist together; which do you think most necessary
to the Republic?” The unhappy man, full of the infatuation of the time,
stammered out, “Why, Robespierre is necessary, of course, but—” “It is enough; in saying that you have
passed judgment.” And it came about in this way that the unanimous verdict
condemned the Indulgents. Lhuillier alone was acquitted.
Of what
passed in the prison we only know from the lips of an enemy,[20]
but I can see Danton talking still courageously of a thousand things; sitting
in his chair of green damask and drinking his bottle of Burgundy opposite the
silver and the traps of D’Eglantine.[21]
They were not taken back to hear their sentence; it was read to them, as a
matter of form, in the Conciergerie itself. Ducray read it to them one by one
as they were brought into his office. Danton refused to hear it in patience; he
hated the technicality and the form, and he knew that he was condemned long
ago. He committed himself to a last burst of passion before summoning his
strength to meet the ordeal of the streets, and followed his anger by the
insults which for days he had levelled at death. Then for a few hours they kept
a silence not undignified, save only Camille, unfitted for such trials, and
moaning to himself in a corner of the room, whom Danton continually tried to
console, a task in which at the very end of their sad journey he succeeded. It
was part of his broad mind to understand even a writer and an artist, he who
had never written and had only done.
It was
between half-past four and five o’clock in the evening of the same day, the 5th
of April 1794, that the prisoners reappeared. Two carts were waiting for them
at the great gate in the court of the Palais—the gate which is the inner
entrance to the Conciergerie to-day.[22]
About the carts were a numerous escort mounted and with drawn swords, but the
victims took their seats as they chose, and of the fifteen the Dantonists
remained together. Hérault, Camille, Lacroix, Westermann, Fabre, Danton went up
the last into the second cart, and the procession moved out of the courtyard
and turned to the left under the shadow of the Palais, and then to the left
again round the Tour de l’Horloge, and so on to the quay. They passed the
window of the tribunal, the window from which Danton’s loud voice had been
heard across the river; they went creaking slowly past the old Maine, past the
rooms that had been Roland’s lodgings, till they came to the corner of the Pont
Neuf; and as the carts turned from the trees of the Place Dauphine on to the
open bridge, they left the shade and passed into the full blaze of the westering
sun within an hour of its setting.
Early as
was the season, the air was warm and pleasant, the leaves and the buds were out
on the few trees, the sky was unclouded. All that fatal spring was summerlike,
and this day was the calmest and most beautiful that it had known. The light,
already tinged with evening, came flooding the houses of the north bank till
their glass shone in the eyes. There it caught the Café de l’École where Danton
had sat a young lawyer seven years before, and had seen the beauty of his first
wife in her father’s house , to the right the corner of the old Hotel de Ville
caught the glow, to the left the Louvre flamed with a hundred windows.
Where
the light poured up the river and came reflected from the Seine on to the
bridge, it marked out the terrible column that was moving ponderously forward
to death. A great crowd, foolish, unstable, varied, of whom some sang, some ran
to catch a near sight of the “Indulgents,” some pitied, and a few understood
and despaired of the Republic—all these surging and jostling as a crowd will
that is forced to a slow pace and confined by the narrowness of an old
thoroughfare, stretched from one end of the bridge to the other, and you would
have seen them in the sunlight, brilliant in the colours that men wore in those
days, while here and there a red cap of liberty marked the line of heads.
But in
the centre of this crowd and showing above it, could be seen the group of men
who were about to die. The carts hidden by the people, the horses’ heads just showing
above the mob, surrounded by the sharp gleams that only come from swords, there
rose distinguished the figures of the Dantonists. There stood Hérault de
Séchelles upright, his face contemptuous, his colour high, “as though he had
just risen from a feast” There on the far side of the cart sat Fabre D’Eglantine,
bound, ill, collapsed, his head resting on his chest, muttering and
complaining. There on the left side, opposite Fabre, is Camille, bound but
still frenzied, calling loudly to the people, raving, “Peuple, pauvre Peuple!” He
still kept in his poet’s head the dream of the People! They had been deceived,
but they were just, they would save him.
He
wrestled with his ropes and tore his shirt open at the bosom, clenching his
bound hands—clutched in his fingers through all the struggle shone the bright
hair of Lucille. Danton stood up immense and quiet between them. One of those
broad shoulders touched D’Eglantine, the other Desmoulins; their souls leant
upon his body. And such comfort as there was or control in the central group
came out like warmth from the chief of these friends.
He had
been their leader and their strength for five years; they were round him now
like younger brothers orphaned. The weakness of one, the vices of another, came
leaning for support on the great rock of his form. For these were not the
Girondins, the admirable stoics, of whom each was a sufficient strength to his
own soul: they were the Dantonists, who had been moulded and framed by the
strength and genius of one man. He did not fail them a moment in the journey,
and he died last to give them courage.
As they
passed on and left the river, they lost the light again and plunged into
shadow; the cool air was about them in the deep narrow streets. They could see
the light far above them only, as they turned into the gulf of the Rue St.
Honoré, down which the lives of men poured like a stream to be lost and wasted
in the Place de la Revolution. Up its steep sides echoed and re-echoed the
noise of the mob like waves. They could see as they rolled slowly along the
people at the windows, the men sitting in the cafés or standing up to watch
them go by. One especially Danton saw suddenly and for a moment. He was
standing with a drawing-book in his hand and sketching rapidly with short
interrupted glances. It was David, an enemy.
Then
there appeared upon their left another sight; it was the only one in that long
hour which drove Danton out of his control: it was the house of Duplay. There,
hidden somewhere behind the close shutters, was Robespierre. They all turned to
it loudly, and the sentence was pronounced which some say God has executed—that
it should disappear and not be known again, and be hidden by high walls and
destroyed.
The
house was silent, shut, blockaded. It was like a thing which is besieged and
which turns its least sentient outer part to its enemies. It was beleaguered by
the silent and unseen forces which we feel pressing everywhere upon the living.
For it contained the man who had sent that cartload of his friends to death.
Their fault had been to preach the permanent sentiments of mankind, to talk of
mercy, and to recall in 1794 the great emotions of the early Revolution—the
desire for the Republic where every kind of man could sit and laugh at the same
table, the Republic of the Commensales. They were the true heirs of the spirit
of the Federations, and it was for this that they were condemned. Even at this
last moment there radiated from them the warmth of heart that proceeds from a
group of friends and lovers till it blesses the whole of a nation with an equal
affection. Theirs had been the instinct of and the faith in the happy life of
the world. It was for this that the Puritan had struck them down; and yet it is
the one spirit that runs through any enduring reform, the only spirit that can
lead us at last to the Republic.
In a
remote room, where the noise of the wheels could not reach him, sat the man
who, by some fatal natural lack or some sin of ambition unrepented, had become
the Inquisitor—the mad, narrow enemy of mercy and of all good things.
For a
moment he and his error had the power to condemn, repeating a tragedy of which
the world is never weary—the mean thing was killing the great.
Nevertheless,
if you will consider the men in the tumbril, you will find them not to be
pitied except for two things, that they were loved by women whom they could not
see, and that they were dying in the best and latest time of their powerful
youth. All these young men were loved, and in other things they should be
counted fortunate. They had with their own persons already transformed the
world. Here the writer knew that his talent, the words he had so carefully
chosen and with such delight in his power, had not been wasted upon praise or
fortune, but had achieved the very object. There the orator knew and could
remember how his great voice had called up the armies and thrown back the
kings.
But if
the scene was a tragedy, it was a tragedy of the real that refused to follow
the unities. All nature was at work, crowded into the Revolutionary time, and
the element that Shakespeare knew came in of itself—the eternal comedy that
seems to us, according to our mood, the irony, the madness, or the cruelty of
things, was fatally present to make the day complete; and the grotesque, like a
discordant note, contrasted with and emphasised the terrible.
Fabre, who had best known how omnipresent is this
complexity—Fabre, who had said, “Between the giving and taking of snuff there
is a comedy”—furnished the example now. Danton hearing so much weakness and so
many groans from the sick man said, “What is your complaint?” He answered, “I
have written a play called ‘The Maltese Orange,’ and I fear the police have
taken it, and that some one will steal it and get the fame.” Poor Fabre! It is
lost, and no one has the ridicule of his little folly. Danton answered him with
a phrase to turn the blood: “Tais toi ! Dans une semaine tu feras assez de
vers,” and imposed silence. Nor did this satisfy Fate; there were other points
in the framework of the incongruous which she loves to throw round terror. A
play was running in the opera called the “10th of August;” in this the
Dantonists were represented on the stage. When the Dantonists were hardly
buried it was played again that very night, and actors made up for Hérault and
the rest passed before a public that ignored or had forgotten what the
afternoon had seen. More than this, there was already set in type a verse which
the street-hawkers cried and sold that very night. For the sake of its
coincidence I will take the liberty of translating it into rhymed heroics: —
“When Danton, Desmoulins, and D’Eglantine
Were ferried over to the world unseen,
Charon, that equitable citizen,
Handed their change
to these distinguished men,
‘Pray keep the change,’ they cried; ‘we pay the fare
For Couthon, and
St. Just, and Robespierre.’”[23]
Danton
spared only Camille, and as he did not stop appealing to the people, told him
gently to cease. “Leave the rabble there,” he said, “leave them alone.” But for
himself he kept on throwing angry jests at death. “May I sing?” he said to the
executioner. Sanson thought he might, for all he knew. Then Danton said to him,
“I have made some verses, and I will sing them.” He sang loudly a verse of the
fall of Robespierre, and then laughed as though he had been at the old café
with his friends.
There
was a man (Arnault of the Academy) who lived afterwards to a great age, and who
happened to be crossing the Rue St. Honoré as the carts went past. In a Paris
that had all its business to do, many such men came and went, almost forgetting
that politics existed even then. But this batch of prisoners haunted him. He
had seen Danton standing singing with laughter, he hurried on to the Rue de la
Monnaie, had his say with Michael, who was awaiting him, and then, fall of the
scene, ran back across the Tuilleries gardens, and pressing his face to the
railings looked over the great Place de la Revolution. The convoy had arrived,
the carts stood at the foot of the guillotine, and his memory of the scene is
the basis of its history.
It was
close on six, and the sun was nearly set behind the trees of the Étoile; it
reddened the great plaster statue of Liberty which stood in the middle of the
Place, where the obelisk is now, and to which Madame Roland delivered her last
phrase. It sent a level beam upon the vast crowd that filled the square, and
cast long shadows, sending behind the guillotine a dark lane over the people.
The day had remained serene and beautiful to the last, the sky was stainless,
and the west shone like a forge. Against it, one by one, appeared the figures
of the condemned. Hérault de Séchelles, straight and generous in his bearing,
first showed against the light, standing on the high scaffold conspicuous. He looked
at the Garde Meuble, and from one of its high windows a woman’s hand found it
possible to wave a farewell. Lacroix next, equally alone; Camille, grown easy
and self-controlled, was the third. One by one they came up the few steps,
stood clearly for a moment in the fierce light, black or framed in scarlet, and
went down.
Danton
was the last. He had stood unmoved at the foot of the steps as his friends
died. Trying to embrace Hérault before he went up, roughly rebuking the
executioner who tore them asunder, waiting his turn without passion, he heard
the repeated fall of the knife in the silence of the crowd. His great figure,
more majestic than in the days of his triumph, came against the sunset. The man
who watched it from the Tuilleries gate grew half afraid, and tells us that he
understood for a moment what, kind of things Dante himself had seen. By an
accident he had to wait some seconds longer than the rest; the executioner
heard him muttering, “I shall never see her again . . . no weakness,” but his
only movement was to gaze over the crowd. They say that a face met his, and
that a sacramental hand was raised in absolution.[24]
He stood
thus conspicuous for a moment over the people whom he had so often swayed. In
that attitude he remains for history. When death suddenly strikes a friend, the
picture which we carry of him in our minds is that of vigorous life. His last
laughter, his last tones of health, his rapid step, or his animated gesture
reproduce his image for ever. So it is with Danton; there is no mask of Danton
dead, nor can you complete his story with the sense of repose. We cannot see
his face in the calm either of triumph or of sleep—the brows grown level, the
lips satisfied, the eyelids closed. He will stand through whatever centuries
the story of the Revolution may be told as he stood on the scaffold looking
westward and transfigured by the red sun, still courageous, still powerful in
his words, and still instinct with that peculiar energy, self-forming,
self-governing, and whole. He has in his final moment the bearing of the
tribune, the glance that had mastered the danger in Belgium, the force that had
nailed Roland, to his post in September, and that had commanded the first
Committee. The Republic that he desired, and that will come, was proved in his
carriage, and passed from him into the crowd.
When
Sanson put a hand upon his shoulder the ghost of Mirabeau stood by his side and
inspired him with the pride that had brightened the death-chamber of three
years before. He said, “Show my head to the people; it is well worth the while.”
Then they did what “ they had to do, and without any kind of fear, his great
soul went down the turning in the road.
They
showed his head to the people, and the sun set. There rose at once the confused
noise of a thousand voices that rejoiced, or questioned, or despaired, and in
the gathering darkness the Parisians returned through the narrow streets
eastward to their homes.
[1] Paine’s ignorance of French was
such that his speech on Louis’s exile was translated for him.
[2] La Roche du Maine.
[3] Levasseur tells ns that Delmas
spoke first, and that his remarks took the form of a definite motion for the
appearance of the Committees to account for their action. Legendre is mentioned
here because he alone is agreed upon by all the eye-witnesses (and by the Moniteur)
as being the principal defender of Danton We must not underestimate his
courage; it was he who with a very small force shut the club of the Jacobins on
the night of the 9th Thermidor, and so turned the flank of the Robespierrian
faction.
[4] “Quand les restes de la faction .
. . ne seront plus . . . vous n'aurez plus d'exemples à dormer . . . ils ne
restera que le peuple et vous, et le gouvernement dont vous êtes le centre
inviolable.”
[5] “Mauvais citoyen, tu as conspiré;
faux ami, tu disais, il y a deux jours, du mal de Desmoulins que tu as perdu;
méchant homme, tu as comparé l’opinion publique à une femme de mauvaise vie, tu
as dit que l'honneur était ridicule . . . si Fabre est innocent, si D'Orléans,
si Dumouriez furent innocents tu l’est sans doute. J'en ai trop dit—tu
repondras à la Justice.”
[6] Robespierre’s notes for St. Just’s
report were published by M. France in 1841 among the “Papiers trouve’s chez
Robespierre.”
[7] “La Convention Nation ale après
avoir entendu les rapports des Comités de Sureté générale et du Salut Public,
dérète d'accusation Camille Desmoulins, Héault, Danton, Phillippeaux Lacroix .
. . en conséquence elle declare leur mise en jugement.” These were the last
words of St. Just’s speech, and formed his substantive motion.
"Ce
décret est adopté à l’unanimité et au milieu des plus vifs
applaudssements."—Moniteur, April 2, 1794 (13th (Germinal, year
II.).
[8] Couthon was a cripple. Once (later)
in the Convention it was called out to him “Triumvir,” and he glanced at his
legs and said, “How could I be a triumvir?” The logical connection between good
legs and triumvirates was more apparent to himself than to those whom he caused
to be guillotined.
[9] We have the fragments of this “No.
VII.,” which was not published. See M. Claretie’s C. Desmoulins, p. 274
of Mrs. Cashel Hoey’s translation,
[10] Danton would have been
thirty-five in October, Desmoulins had been thirty-four in March—not
thirty-three, as he said at the trial. I give this on the authority of M.
Claretie, who in his book quotes the birth-certificate, which he himself had
seen (March 2, 1760).
[11] March 10, 1793. Exception has
been taken to the whole sentiment by Dr. Robinet, but great, or rather unique,
as is his authority, I cannot believe that an appeal—especially an exclamatory
appeal of this nature—was foreign to his impetuous and merciful temper.
[12] Wallon, Tribinal
Révolutionnaire, vol. iii. p. 156.
[13] It is known that Fleuriot and
Fouquier were alone when the jury were “chosen by lot.” This appeared at the
trial of Fouquier. For the notes of Lebrun, see Appendix X.
[14] Wallon, Tribunal
Révolutionnaire, vol. iii. p. 155.
[15] See Appendix X. The speeches which
I have written here are reconstructed from these notes, and I must beg the
reader to check the consecutive sentences of the text by reference to the
disjointed notes printed in the Appendix.
[16] Wallon, Tribunal
Révolutionnaire, iii, 169, quotes Archives, V. 342, Dossier 641,
1st Part, No. 34.
[17] Fouquier had written a letter to
his distant relative Desmoulins, begging for some employment, on August 20,
1792, just after the success of Danton' s party, in which Desmoulins had of
course shared. It is by no means dignified and almost servile. See Claretie, Desmoulins,
English edition, p. 318.
[18] This is M. Wallon’s opinion, who
gives both versions, and from whom I take so much of this description. See Tribunal
Révolutionnaire, iii. 177.
[19] All this appears in the trial of
Fouquier.
[20] They are given in Clarétie’s Desmoulins
in the Appendix.
[21] See the list of the prisoner’s
effects in Clarétie’s Desmoulins.
[22] This gate may be seen to-day just
to the right of the great staircase in the court of the Palais de Justice. It
has an iron grating before it.
[23] The original of this I take from
Ciarétie, who quotes P. A. Lecomte, Memorial sur la Révolution Française.
"Lorsqu'arrive’s au bords du Phlégéton
Camille Desmoulins, D’Eglantine et Danton,
Payment pour passer ce fleuve redouatble
Le nautonnier Charon (citoyen équitable)
A nos trois passagers voulait remettre en mains
L'excédant de la taxe imposé aux humains.
'Garde,’ lui dit Danton, la somme toute entière;
Je paye pour Couthon, St. Just et Robespierre.”
[24] It was Madame Gély who told this
to Despoi’s grandfather. Clarétie has mentioned it. But Michelet must have
heard from the family about this same priest (Kerénavant le Breton), for
according to Madame Gé1y it was he who married Danton for the second time.