d before its presence, and fled from
it shrieking, with averted hands. Marat thrust swords into the giant's
half-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody incitement to slay hip
and thigh, and so filled the land with a horror that has not faded from
out of men's minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned that the
problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade the
insurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries.
Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by
his own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid
the perplexities of practice. The teaching of Rousseau was ever pouring
like thin smoke among his ideas, and clouding his view of actual
conditions. The Tenth of August produced a considerable change in
Robespierre's point of view. It awoke him to the precipitous steepness
of the slope down which the revolutionary car was rushing headlong. His
faith in the infallibility of the people suffered no shock, but he was
in a moment alive to the need of walking warily, and his whole march
from now until the end, twenty-three months later, became timorous,
cunning, and oblique. His intelligence seemed to move in subterranean
tunnels, with the gleam of an equivocal premiss at one end, and the mist
of a vague conclusion at the other.

The enthusiastic pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism,
and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel of
his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have
been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised
his notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place between
him and Marat. Robespierre began by assuring the Friend of the People
that he quite understood the atrocious demands for blood with which the
columns of Marat's newspaper were filled, to be merely useful
exaggerations of his real designs. Marat repelled the disparaging
imputation of clemency and common sense, and talked in his familiar vein
of poniarding brigands, burning despots alive in their palaces, and
impaling the traitors of the Assembly on their own benches.
'Robespierre,' says Marat, 'listened to me with affright; he turned pale
and said nothing. The interview confirmed the opinion I had always had
of him, that he united the integrity of a thoroughly honest man and the
zeal of a good patriot, with the enlightenment of a wise senator, but
that he was without e