are quick to recognise the temperament of the priest, and
recognising they adore. A rich widow of Nantes besought him with
pertinacious tenderness to accept not only her purse but her hand.
Mirabeau's sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the blue
heavens.

Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must always be seemly in
the spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are very hard. He had a
single room in the house of Duplay, at the extreme west end of the long
Rue Saint Honore, half a mile from the Jacobin Club, and less than that
from the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent and
Legislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him for
bed-chamber as well as for the uses of the day, was scantily furnished,
and he shared the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, a
sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their
guest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest
daughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and
Robespierre looked forward to the joys of the hearth, so soon as his
country should be delivered from the oppressors without and the traitors
within.

Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity, he intended it to
be a force and not a decoration. An occasion of testing his influence
arose in the winter of 1791. The situation had become more and more
difficult. The court was more disloyal and more perverse, as its hopes
that the nightmare would come to an end became fainter. In the summer of
1791, the German Emperor, the King of Prussia, and minor champions of
retrograde causes issued the famous Declaration of Pilnitz. The menace
of intervention was the one element needed to make the position of the
monarchy desperate. It roused France to fever heat. For along with the
foreign kings were the French princes of the blood and the French
nobles. In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the King to declare
war against Austria. Robespierre, in spite of the strong tide of warlike
feeling, led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is one of the most
sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the conflict were
terrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles were victorious, all
that the Revolution had won would be instantly and irretrievably lost.
If, on the other hand, the French armies were victorious, one of two
disasters might follow. Either the troops might become a weapon in the
hands of