ain extent, reconcilable with a sense of
duty; inasmuch as even while signing warrants for transferring
hundreds of people to the Revolutionary Tribunal--which was equivalent
to sending them to the scaffold--Robespierre imagined that he was
acting throughout under a clear, an imperious necessity: only ridding
society of the elements that disturbed its purity and tranquillity.
Stupendous hallucination! And did this fanatic really feel no pang of
conscience? That will afterwards engage our consideration. Frequently,
he was called on to proscribe and execute his most intimate friends;
but it does not appear that any personal consideration ever stayed his
proceedings. First, he swept away Royalists and aristocrats; next, he
sacrificed the Girondists; last, he came to his companion-Jacobins.
Accusing Danton and his friends of a tendency to moderation, he had
the dexterity to get them proscribed and beheaded. When Danton was
seized, he could hardly credit his senses: he who had long felt
himself sure of being one day dictator by public acclamation, and to
have been deceived by that dreamer, Robespierre, was most humiliating.
But Robespierre would not dare to put _him_ to death! Grave
miscalculation! He was immolated like the rest; the crowd looking on
with indifference. Along with him perished Camille Desmoulins, a young
man of letters, and a Jacobin, but convicted of advocating clemency.
Robespierre was one of Camille's private and most valued friends; he
had been his instructor in politics, and had become one of the
trustees under his marriage-settlement. Robespierre visited at the
house of his _protege_; chatted with the young and handsome Madame
Desmoulins at her parties; and frequently dandled the little Horace
Desmoulins on his knee, and let him play with his bunch of seals. Yet,
because they were adherents of Danton, he sent husband and wife to the
scaffold within a few weeks of each other! What eloquent and touching
appeals were made to old recollections by the mother of Madame
Desmoulins. Robespierre was reminded of little Horace, and of his duty
as a family guardian. All would not do. His heart was marble; and so
the wretched pair were guillotined. Camille's letter to his wife, the
night before he was led to the scaffold, cannot be read without
emotion. He died with a lock of her hair clasped convulsively in his
hand.

Having thus cleared away to some extent all those who stood in the way
of his views, Robespierre