itated himself to the front of the opinion that
was yelling against his friends of yesterday. In order to keep his usual
post in the van of the Revolution, in order to secure the advantage to
his own popularity of an execution which the public voice seemed to
demand, he came forward as the author of that execution, though only the
day before he had hesitated about its utility, and though it was, in
truth far less useful to him than it proved to be to his future
antagonists.'

Robespierre first alarmed Danton's friends by assuming a certain icy
coldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the faction of
the so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did, to his native
village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a little clearness of
sight in the night that wrapped him about. He was devoid of personal
ambition; he never had any humour for mere factious struggles. His,
again, was the temperament of violent force, and in such types the
reaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the last
twenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of
strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the irony
of things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, the
vehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating
irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he could
have done anything. The balance of force, after the suppression of the
Hebertists, was irretrievably against him, as calculation had already
revealed to Robespierre.

There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on the
eve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on both
sides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play of
sinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the alleged
details are plainly apocryphal. After all, 'Religion ist in der Thiere
Trieb,' says Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim,
into whose breast he means to plunge a sword.' Danton was warned that
Robespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bare
idea,' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eat
his bowels out.' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of the
mighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. The
truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, and
perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a
very poor