error, with Robespierre the king. The struggles
between the boa and the lion are past: the boa has consumed the lion,
and is heavy with the gorge,--Danton has fallen, and Camille Desmoulins.
Danton had said before his death, "The poltroon Robespierre,--I alone
could have saved him." From that hour, indeed, the blood of the dead
giant clouded the craft of "Maximilien the Incorruptible," as at last,
amidst the din of the roused Convention, it choked his voice. ("Le sang
de Danton t'etouffe!" (the blood of Danton chokes thee!) said Garnier
de l'Aube, when on the fatal 9th of Thermidor, Robespierre gasped feebly
forth, "Pour la derniere fois, President des Assassins, je te demande
la parole." (For the last time, President of Assassins, I demand to
speak.)) If, after that last sacrifice, essential, perhaps, to his
safety, Robespierre had proclaimed the close of the Reign of Terror,
and acted upon the mercy which Danton had begun to preach, he might have
lived and died a monarch. But the prisons continued to reek,--the glaive
to fall; and Robespierre perceived not that his mobs were glutted to
satiety with death, and the strongest excitement a chief could give
would be a return from devils into men.

We are transported to a room in the house of Citizen Dupleix, the
menuisier, in the month of July, 1794; or, in the calendar of the
Revolutionists, it was the Thermidor of the Second Year of the Republic,
One and Indivisible! Though the room was small, it was furnished and
decorated with a minute and careful effort at elegance and refinement.
It seemed, indeed, the desire of the owner to avoid at once what was
mean and rude, and what was luxurious and voluptuous. It was a trim,
orderly, precise grace that shaped the classic chairs, arranged the
ample draperies, sank the frameless mirrors into the wall, placed bust
and bronze on their pedestals, and filled up the niches here and there
with well-bound books, filed regularly in their appointed ranks. An
observer would have said, "This man wishes to imply to you,--I am
not rich; I am not ostentatious; I am not luxurious; I am no indolent
Sybarite, with couches of down, and pictures that provoke the sense;
I am no haughty noble, with spacious halls, and galleries that awe the
echo. But so much the greater is my merit if I disdain these excesses
of the ease or the pride, since I love the elegant, and have a taste!
Others may be simple and honest, from the very coarseness of their
habit