xultation of their
silly gladness were suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. All
we can say is that Robespierre's bitter demeanour towards Clootz was
ungenerous; but then this is only natural in him. Robespierre often
clothed cool policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear in
any phrase he ever used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, the
mark of true generosity; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no
element of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never be
wanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted the
atrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinking
not of mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that her
execution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, and he was so
unmanly as to speak of her as _la meprisable soeur de Louis XVI_. Such
a phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul.

Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and denouncing the bloody
extravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of Parisian
authority in the provinces; nor from standing firm against the execution
of the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to question the purgation
of the National Convention on the Thirty-first of May. But the return of
Collot d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot was by his
position the ally of Billaud, and to attack him, therefore, was to
attack the most powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety.
Billaud was too formidable. He was always the impersonation of the ruder
genius of the Revolution, and the incarnation of the philosophy of the
Terror, not as a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. His
pale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. He
had no gifts of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like the
silence of the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was said
by contemporaries that if Vadier was a hyaena, Barere a jackal, and
Robespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger.

The cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger, jackal,
and hyaena, on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage and
timidity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he had been
premature; and a convenient illness, which some suppose to have been
feigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where he
felt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot doubt that both he and
Danton were perfectly assured tha