ually ruled Paris. Danton, the possible dictator, the impure man
ready to adjust compromises with the enemies of liberty, lax in
conscience and in action, Danton too was down. The solid phalanx of
the Jacobin Club, the remnant of the Commune, the Revolutionary
Tribunal, stood solidly arrayed behind Robespierre; and the Convention
voted with perfect regularity and unanimity every decree it was asked
for.

But this attitude of the Convention only represented the momentary
paralysis of fear. No one would venture on debate, leave alone
opposition. Men like Sieyes attended punctiliously day after day,
month after month, and {209} never opened their lips,--only their eyes,
watching the corner of the Mountain, whence the reeking oracle was
delivered. In the city it was the same. The cafes, so tumultuous and
excited at the opening of the Revolution, are oppressively silent now.
A crowd gathers in the evening to hear the gazette read, but in that
crowd few dare to venture a word, an opinion; occasional whispers are
exchanged, the list of those sent to the guillotine is eagerly listened
to, and then all disperse.

And the prisons are full,--of aristocrats, of suspects, of wealthy
bourgeois. Those who have money occasionally buy themselves out, and
generally succeed in living well; while outside the prison doors,
angry, half-demented women revile the aristocrats who betray the people
and who, even in prison, eat delicate food and drink expensive wines.
Among the prisoners there is some light-heartedness, much
demoralization, with here and there, at rare intervals, a Madame Roland
or an Andre Chenier, to keep high above degradation their minds and
their characters. And every day comes the heartrending hour of the
roll call for the Revolutionary Tribunal which with so many means death.

The Tribunal itself, loses more and more {210} any sense of legality it
had at the outset. Its procedure still carries a semblance of legal
method, but it is really an automatic machine for affixing a legal
label on political murders. And the Tribunal, as it progresses in its
career, becomes more and more insane in its hatred of the party it
seeks to destroy, of the anti-revolutionist, of the aristocrat. Is it
not recorded that it ordered the arrest of a little girl of 13, Mlle.
de Chabannes, suspect "because she had sucked the aristocratic milk of
her mother." The Tribunal acquitted one person in every five; up to
the fall of Danton i