ed from the condition of a centralised
monarchy; they had also the prestige of being a government that had done
its work triumphantly. We are now in March. In July we shall find that
Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, of
playing off the Convention against the Committee. In July that policy
ended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any more successful
four months earlier?

What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound in all morality to defend
Danton in the Convention at every hazard. Possibly so; but then to run
risks for chivalry's sake was not in Robespierre's nature, and no man
can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. His narrow
head and thin blood and instable nerve, his calculating humour and his
frigid egoism, disinclined him to all games of chance. His apologists
have sought to put a more respectable colour on his abandonment of
Danton. The precisian, they say, disapproved of Danton's lax and
heedless courses. Danton said to him one day:--'What do I care? Public
opinion is a strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense.' How should
the puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Danton
delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had given
various gross names of contempt to Saint Just. Was Robespierre not to
feel insults offered to the ablest and most devoted of his lieutenants?
What was more important than all, the acclamations with which the
partisans of reaction greeted the fall of the Ultras, made it necessary
to give instant and unmistakable notice to the foes of the Revolution
that the goddess of the scorching eye and fiery hand still grasped the
axe of her vengeance.

These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes to show that
Robespierre was really moved by nothing more than his invariable dread
of being left behind, of finding himself on the weaker side, of not
seeming practical and political enough. And having made up his mind that
the stronger party was bent on the destruction of the Dantonists, he
became fiercer than Billaud himself. It is constantly seen that the
waverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner overcomes the
agony of irresolution, than he flings himself on his object with a
vindictive tenacity that seems to repay him for all the moral
humiliation inflicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems the
slowness of his approach by the fury of his spring. 'Robespierre,' says
M. d'Hericault, 'precip