nced or not. In any event, it is
present at the dance, and thus consecrates an unique orgy, not
Rubens' "Kermesse" in the open air, racy and healthy, but a nocturnal
boulevard-jollification, a "Mardi-gras" composed of lean and haggard
scapegraces.--In the great nave of the Cathedral, "the dancers, almost
naked, with bare necks and breasts, and stockings down at the heel,"
writhe and stamp, "howling the carmagnole." In the side chapels, which
are "shut off by high tapestries, prostitutes with shrill voices" pursue
their avocation.[3222]--To descend to this low level so barefacedly, to
fraternise with barrier sots, and wenches, to endure their embraces and
hiccoughs, is bad enough, even for docile deputies. More than one half
of them loathed it beforehand and remained at home; after this they do
not feel disposed to attend the Convention.[3223]--But the "Mountain
sends for them, and an officer brings them back;" it is necessary that
they should co-operate through their presence and felicitations in the
profanations and apostasies which follow;[3224] it is necessary that
they should approve of and decree that which they hold in horror, not
alone folly and nonsense, but crime, the murder of innocent people, and
that of their friends.--All this is done. "Unanimously, and with the
loudest applause," the Left, united with the Right, sends Danton to the
scaffold, its natural chieftain, the great promoter and leader of the
Revolution.[3225] "Unanimously, and with the loudest applause,"
the Right, united with the Left, votes the worse decrees of the
Revolutionary government.[3226] "Unanimously," with approving and
enthusiastic cheers, manifesting the warmest sympathy for Collot
d'Herbois, Couthon, and Robespierre,[3227] the Convention, through
multiplied and spontaneous re-elections, maintains the homicidal
government which the Plain detests, because it is homicidal, and which
the Mountain detests, because it is decimated by it. Plain and Mountain,
by virtue of terror, majority after majority, end in consenting to and
bringing about their own suicide: on the 22nd of Prairial, the entire
Convention has stretched out its neck;[3228] on the 8th of Thermidor,
for a quarter of an hour after Robespierre's speech,[3229] it has again
stretched this out, and would probably have succumbed, had not five or
six of them, whom Robespierre designated or named, Bourdon de l'Oise,
Vadier, Cambon, Billaud and Panis, stimulated by the animal instinct