adhouse.[3146] From the 19th of August he excites people to attack
the prisons. "The wisest and best course to pursue," he says, "is to
go armed to the Abbaye, drag out the traitors, especially the Swiss
officers and their accomplices, and put them to the sword. What folly
it is to give them a trial! That is already done. You have massacred the
soldiers, why should you spare the officers, ten times guiltier?"--Also,
two days later, his brain teeming with an executioner's fancies,
insisting that "the soldiers deserved a thousand deaths. As to the
officers, they should be drawn and quartered, like Louis Capet and his
tools of the Manege."[3147]--On the strength of this the Commune adopts
him as its official editor, assigns him a tribune in its assembly room,
entrusts him to report its acts, and soon puts him on its supervisory or
executive committee.

A fanatic of this stamp, however, is good for nothing but as a
mouthpiece or instigator; he may, at best, figure in the end among the
subordinate managers.--The chief of the enterprise,[3148] Danton, is
of another species, and of another stature, a veritable leader of
men: Through his past career and actual position, through his popular
cynicism, ways and language, through his capacity for taking the
initiative and for command, through his excessive corporeal and
intellectual vigor, through his physical ascendancy due to his ardent,
absorbing will, he is well calculated for his terrible office.--He
alone of the Commune has become Minister, and there is no one but him to
shelter the violations of the Commune under the protection or under the
passivity of the central authority.--He alone of the Commune and of
the ministry is able to push things through and harmonize action in
the pell-mell of the revolutionary chaos; both in the councils of the
ministry which he governs, as he formerly governed at the Hotel-de
ville. In the constant uproar of incoherent discussions,[3149] athwart
"propositions ex abrupto, among shouts, swearing, and the going and
coming of questioning petitioners," he is seen mastering his new
colleagues with his "stentorian voice, his gestures of an athlete, his
fearful threats," taking upon himself their duties, dictating to them
what and whom he chooses, "fetching in commissions already drawn
up," taking charge of everything, "making propositions, arrests, and
proclamations, issuing brevets," and drawing millions out of the public
treasury, casting a sop to