ulties that might well have crushed them.
Besides their efforts, justly held incomparable, to hurl back the enemy
from the frontiers, they at once in the spirit of Condorcet's speech,
made at so strange a season, set vigorously about the not less noble
task of legal reforms and political reorganisation. The unrivalled
ingenuity and fertility of the French character in all the arts of
compact and geometric construction never showed itself so supreme. The
civil code was drawn up in a month.[36] Constitutions abounded. Cynical
historians laugh at the eagerness of the nation, during the months that
followed the deposition of the king, to have a constitution; and, so far
as they believed or hoped that a constitution would remedy all ills,
their faith was assuredly not according to knowledge. It shows, however,
the fundamental and seemingly ineradicable respect for authority which
their history has engendered in the French, that even in this, their
most chaotic hour, they craved order and its symbols.

Condorcet, along with Tom Paine, Sieyes, and others, was a member of
the first committee for framing a constitution. They laboured
assiduously from September to February 1793, when the project was laid
upon the table, prefaced by an elaborate dissertation of Condorcet's
composition.[37] The time was inauspicious. The animosities between the
Girondins and the Mountain were becoming every day more furious and
deadly. In the midst of this appalling storm of rage and hate and
terror, Condorcet--at one moment wounding the Girondins by reproaches
against their egotism and personalities, at another exasperating the
Mountain by declaring of Robespierre that he had neither an idea in his
head nor a feeling in his heart--still pertinaciously kept crying out
for the acceptance of his constitution. It was of no avail. The
revolution of the second of June came, and swept the Girondins out of
the Chamber. Condorcet was not among them, but his political days were
numbered. 'What did you do all that time?' somebody once asked of a
member of the Convention, during the period which was now beginning and
which lasted until Thermidor in 1794. 'I lived,' was the reply.
Condorcet was of another temper. He cared as little for his life as
Danton or Saint-Just cared for theirs. Instead of cowering down among
the men of the Plain or the frogs of the Marsh, he withstood the
Mountain to the face.

Herault de Sechelles, at the head of another committee, b