nqueror at Rivoli afterwards made the most dazzling street in Europe.
The Committee of Public Safety sat in the Pavillon de Flore, at the
opposite end of the Tuileries on the river bank. The approaches were
protected by guns and by a bodyguard, while inside there flitted to and
fro a cloud of familiars, who have been compared by the enemies of the
great Committee to the mutes of the court of the Grand Turk. Any one who
had business with this awful body had to grope his way along gloomy
corridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp at either end. The
room in which the Committee sat round a table of green cloth was
incongruously gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, the
tapestries, of the ruined court. The members met at eight in the morning
and worked until one; from one to four they attended the sitting of the
Convention. In the evening they met again, and usually sat until night
was far advanced. It was no wonder if their hue became cadaverous, their
eyes hollow and bloodshot, their brows stern, their glance preoccupied
and sinister. Between ten and eleven every evening a sombre piece of
business was transacted, which has half effaced in the memory of
posterity all the heroic industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours.
It was then that Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, brought an
account of his day's labour; how the revolutionary tribunal was working,
how many had been convicted and how many acquitted, how large or how
small had been the batch of the guillotine since the previous night.
Across the breadth of the gardens, beyond their trees and fountains,
stood the Monster itself, with its cruel symmetry, its colour as of the
blood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral as the Fates.

Robespierre has been held responsible for all the violences of the
revolutionary government, and his position on the Committee appeared to
be exceedingly strong. It was, however, for a long time much less strong
in reality than it seemed: all depended upon successfully playing off
one force against another, and at the same time maintaining himself at
the centre of the see-saw. Robespierre was the literary and rhetorical
member of the band; he was the author of the strident manifestoes in
which Europe listened with exasperation to the audacious hopes and
unfaltering purpose of the new France. This had the effect of investing
him in the eyes of foreign nations with supreme and undisputed authority
over the governm