espierre, upon
this, 'il va se retirer, moralement du moins.' Impotent and wearied! But
he had just won a most signal victory for good sense and humanity. Why
was it the only one? If Robespierre was able to save Theot, why could he
not save Cecile Renault?

Cecile Renault was a young seamstress who was found one evening at the
door of Robespierre's lodging, calling out in a state of exaltation that
she would fain see what a tyrant looked like. She was arrested, and upon
her were found two little knives used for the purposes of her trade.
That she should be arrested and imprisoned was natural enough. The times
were charged with deadly fire. People had not forgotten that Marat had
been murdered in his own house. Only a few days before Cecile Renault's
visit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot d'Herbois
on the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for the
excitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play the
martyr, as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens' rusty
pen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the chief of a faction ought
not to be pushed too far. And it was a monstrous crime that because
Robespierre found it convenient to pose as sacrificial victim at the
Club, therefore he should have had no scruple in seeing not only the
wretched Cecile, but her father, her aunt, and one of her brothers, all
despatched to the guillotine in the red shirt of parricide, as agents of
Pitt and Coburg, and assassins of the father of the land. This was
exactly two days after he had shown his decisive power in the affair of
the religious illuminists. The only possible conclusion open to a plain
man after weighing and putting aside all the sophisms with which this
affair has been obscured, is that Robespierre interfered in the one case
because its further prosecution would have tended to make him
ridiculous, and he did not interfere in the other, because the more
exaggerated, the more melodramatic, the more murderous it was made, the
more interesting an object would he seem in the eyes of his adorers.

The second fact bearing on Robespierre's humanity is this. He had
encouraged the formation and stimulated the activity of popular
commissions, who should provide victims for the Revolutionary Tribunal.
On the Second of Messidor (June 20) a list containing one hundred and
thirty-eight names was submitted for the ratification of the Committee.
The Committee endorsed the b