, they will feel its sharp edge and point.
The Commune, on the motion of Manuel, decides that, so long as public
danger continues, they will stay where they are; it adopts an address by
Robespierre to "restore sovereign power to the people," which means
to fill the streets with armed bands;[3142] it collects together its
brigands by giving them the ownership of all that they stole on the
10th of August.[3143] The session, prolonged into the night, does not
terminate until one o'clock in the morning. Sunday has come and there
is no time to lose, for, in a few hours, the sections, by virtue of the
decree of the National Assembly, and following the example of the Temple
section the evening before, may revoke the pretended representatives at
the Hotel-de-ville. To remain at the Hotel-de-ville, and to be elected
to the convention, demands on the part of the leaders some striking
action, and this they require that very day.--That day is the second of
September.

IV.--Date of the determination of this.--The actors and their parts.

Marat.--Danton.--The Commune.--Its co-operators.--Harmony of
dispositions and readiness of operation.

Since the 23rd of August their resolution is taken.[3144] They have
arranged in their minds a plan of the massacre, and each one, little by
little, spontaneously, according to his aptitudes, takes the part that
suits him or is assigned to him.

Marat, foremost among them all, is the proposer and preacher of the
operation, which, for him, is a perfectly natural one. It is the epitome
of his political system: a dictator or tribune, with full power to
slay, and with no other power but that; a good master executioner,
responsible, and "tied hand and foot"; this is his program for a
government since July the 14th, 1789, and he does not blush at it:
"so much the worse for those who are not on a level with it!"[3145] He
appreciated the character of the Revolution from the first, not through
genius, but sympathetically, he himself being equally as one-sided and
monstrous; crazy with suspicion and beset with a homicidal mania for
the past three years, reduced to one idea through mental impoverishment,
that of murder, having lost the faculty for even the lowest order of
reasoning, the poorest of journalists, save for pikemen and Billingsgate
market-women, so monotonous in his constant paroxysms that the regular
reading of his journal is like listening to hoarse cries from the cells
of a m