ho were making
advances to them. They believed that time was on their side. Tallien,
Collot, Fouche were baffled, and the rigid obstinacy of the Plain
produced a moment of extreme and certain danger.

Whilst they hesitated, Tallien received a note in a remembered
handwriting. That bit of paper saved unnumbered lives, and changed the
fortune of France, for it contained these words: "Coward! I am to be
tried to-morrow." At Bordeaux, Tallien had found a lady in prison,
whose name was Madame de Fontenay, and who was the daughter of the
Madrid banker Cabarrus. She was twenty-one, and people who saw her
for the first time could not repress an exclamation of surprise at her
extraordinary beauty. After her release, she divorced her husband, and
married Tallien. In later years she became the Princesse de Chimay;
but, for writing that note, she received the profane but unforgotten
name of Notre Dame de Thermidor.

On the night of July 26, Tallien and his friends had a third
Conference with Boissy d'Anglas and Durand de Maillane, and at last
they gave way. But they made their terms. They gave their votes
against Robespierre on condition that the Reign of Terror ended with
him. There was no condition which the others would not have accepted
in their extremity, and it is by that compact that the government of
France, when it came into the hands of these men of blood, ceased to
be sanguinary. It was high time, for, in the morning, Robespierre had
delivered the accusing speech which he had been long preparing, and of
which Daunou told Michelet that it was the only very fine speech he
ever made. He spoke of heaven, and of immortality, and of public
virtue; he spoke of himself; he denounced his enemies, naming scarcely
any but Cambon and Fouche. He did not conclude with any indictment, or
with any demand that the Assembly would give up its guilty members.
His aim was to conciliate the Plain, and to obtain votes from the
Mountain, by causing alarm but not despair. The next stroke was
reserved for the morrow, when the Convention, by voting the
distribution of his oration, should have committed itself too far to
recede. The Convention at once voted that 250,000 copies of the speech
should be printed, and that it should be sent to every parish in
France. That was the form in which acceptance, entire and unreserved
acceptance, was expressed. Robespierre thus obtained all that he
demanded for the day. The Assembly would be unable to refuse