ath-giver.

"Thou art smeared," ran the lines, "with the best blood of France. Read
thy sentence! I await the hour when the people shall knell thee to the
doomsman. If my hope deceive me, if deferred too long,--hearken, read!
This hand, which thine eyes shall search in vain to discover, shall
pierce thy heart. I see thee every day,--I am with thee every day. At
each hour my arm rises against thy breast. Wretch! live yet awhile,
though but for few and miserable days--live to think of me; sleep to
dream of me! Thy terror and thy thought of me are the heralds of thy
doom. Adieu! this day itself I go forth to riot on thy fears!" (See
"Papiers inedits trouves chez Robespierre," etc., volume ii. page 155.
(No. lx.))

"Your lists are not full enough!" said the tyrant, with a hollow voice,
as the paper dropped from his trembling hand. "Give them to me!--give
them to me! Think again, think again! Barrere is right--right!
'Frappons! il n'y a que les morts qui ne revient pas!'"

CHAPTER 7.II.

La haine, dans ces lieux, n'a qu'un glaive assassin.
Elle marche dans l'ombre.
La Harpe, "Jeanne de Naples," Act iv. sc. 1.

(Hate, in these regions, has but the sword of the assassin. She
moves in the shade.)

While such the designs and fears of Maximilien Robespierre, common
danger, common hatred, whatever was yet left of mercy or of virtue
in the agents of the Revolution, served to unite strange opposites in
hostility to the universal death-dealer. There was, indeed, an actual
conspiracy at work against him among men little less bespattered than
himself with innocent blood. But that conspiracy would have been idle of
itself, despite the abilities of Tallien and Barras (the only men whom
it comprised, worthy, by foresight and energy, the names of "leaders").
The sure and destroying elements that gathered round the tyrant were
Time and Nature; the one, which he no longer suited; the other, which
he had outraged and stirred up in the human breast. The most atrocious
party of the Revolution, the followers of Hebert, gone to his last
account, the butcher-atheists, who, in desecrating heaven and earth,
still arrogated inviolable sanctity to themselves, were equally enraged
at the execution of their filthy chief, and the proclamation of a
Supreme Being. The populace, brutal as it had been, started as from a
dream of blood, when their huge idol, Danton, no longer filled the
stage of terror, rendering crime po