rest the
daily shedding of blood. The older assumption used to be that he left
Paris, and ceased to be cognisant of the Committee's deliberations. The
minutes, however, prove that this was not the case. Robespierre signed
papers nearly every day of Messidor--(June 19 to July 18) the
blood-stained month between Prairial and Thermidor--and was thoroughly
aware of the doings of the Committee. His partisans have now fallen back
on the singular theory of what they style moral absence. He was present
in the flesh, but standing aloof in the spirit. His frowning silence was
a deadlier rebuke to the slayers and oppressors than secession.
Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the embarrassing fact of
a merciful man standing silent before merciless doings, there are at
least two facts that show its absurdity.

First, there is the affair of Catherine Theot. Catherine Theot was a
crazy old woman of a type that is commoner in protestant than in
catholic countries. She believed herself to have special gifts in the
interpretation of the holy writings, and a few other people as crazy as
herself chose to accept her pretensions. One revelation vouchsafed to
her was to the effect that Robespierre was a Messiah and the new
redeemer of the human race. The Committee of General Security resolved
to indict this absurd sect. Vadier,--one of the roughest of the men whom
the insurrections of Paris had brought to the front--reported on the
charges to the Convention (27 Prairial, June 15), and he took the
opportunity to make Robespierre look profoundly ridiculous. The
unfortunate Messiah sat on his bench, gnawing his lips with bitter rage,
while, amid the sneers and laughter of the Convention, the officers
brought to the bar the foolish creatures who had called him the Son of
God. His thin pride and prudish self-respect were unutterably affronted,
and he quite understood that the ridicule of the mysticism of Theot was
an indirect pleasantry upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to the
Committee of Public Safety, angrily reproached them for permitting the
prosecution, summoned Fouquier-Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him to
let the matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point out that
there was a decree of the Convention ordering him to proceed.
Robespierre was inexorable. The Committee of General Security were
baffled, and the prosecution ended. 'Lutteur impuissant et fatigue,'
says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of Rob