dementia of
the night--that Robespierre was a royalist agent, and that the Commune
were about to deliver the little Lewis from his prison in the Temple.
One body of communist partisans after another was detached from its
allegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place de Greve, and when
companies came up from the sections in obedience to orders from Hanriot
and the Commune, the silence made them suspect a trap, and they withdrew
towards the great metropolitan church or elsewhere.

Barras, whom the Convention had charged with its military defence,
gathered together some six thousand men. With the right instinct of a
man who had studied the history of Paris since the July of 1789, he
foresaw the advantage of being the first to make the attack. He arranged
his forces into two divisions. One of them marched along the quays to
take the Common Hall in front; the other along the Rue Saint Honore to
take it in flank. Inside the Common Hall the staircases and corridors
were alive with bustling messengers, and those mysterious busybodies who
are always found lingering without a purpose on the skirts of great
historic scenes. Robespierre and the other chiefs were in a small room,
preparing manifestoes and signing decrees. They were curiously unaware
of the movements of the Convention. An aggressive attack by the party of
authority upon the party of insurrection was unknown in the tradition of
revolt. They had an easy assurance that at daybreak their forces would
be prepared once more to tramp along the familiar road westwards. It was
now half-past two. Robespierre had just signed the first two letters of
his name to a document before him, when he was startled by cries and
uproar in the Place below. In a few instants he lay stretched on the
ground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot. His brother had either
fallen or had leaped out of the window. Couthon was hurled over a
staircase, and lay for dead. Saint Just was a prisoner.

Whether Robespierre was shot by an officer of the Conventional force, or
attempted to blow out his own brains, we shall never know, any more than
we shall ever be quite assured how Rousseau, his spiritual master, came
to an end. The wounded man was carried, a ghastly sight, first to the
Committee of Public Safety, and then to the Conciergerie, where he lay
in silent stupefaction through the heat of the summer day. As he was an
outlaw, the only legal preliminary before execution was to identify
him. At five