s way rejoicing. On the
8th of June, as President of the Convention, he took the chief part in
a solemn inauguration of the new religion. There were statues,
processions, bonfires, speeches, and Robespierre, beflowered, radiant
in a new purple coat, pontificating over all. But beneath the surface
all was not well. The Convention had not been led through the solemn
farce without protest. Words of insult were hissed by more than one
deputy as Robespierre passed within earshot, and the Jacobin leader
realized fully that behind the {213} docile votes and silent faces
currents of rage and protest were stirring. For this, as for every
ill, there was but one remedy, to sharpen the knife.

Two days later, on the 10th, new decrees were placed before the
Convention for intensifying the operations of the Revolutionary
Tribunal. New crimes were invented "spreading discouragement,
perverting public opinion"; the prisoner's defence was practically
taken away from him; and, most important, members of the Convention
lost their inviolability. The Convention voted the decree, but terror
had now pushed it to the wall and self-defence automatically sprang up.
From that moment the Convention nerved itself to the inevitable
struggle. Billaud, Collot and Barere, the _impures_ of the Committee
of Public Safety, looked despairingly on all sides of the Convention
for help to rid themselves of the monster, whose tentacles they already
felt beginning to twine about them.

Just at this critical moment a trivial incident arose that pierced
Robespierre's armour in its weakest joint, and that crystallized the
fear of the Convention into ridicule,--ridicule that proved the
precursor of revolt. Catherine Theot, a female spiritualist, or
medium, as we {214} should call her at the present day, highly elated
at the triumph of the Supreme Being over the unemotional Goddess of
Reason, had made Robespierre the hero of her half-insane inspirations.
She now announced to her credulous devotees that she was the mother of
God, and that Robespierre was her son. It became the sensation of the
day. Profiting by the temporary absence of St. Just with the army in
the Netherlands, the Committee of Public Safety decided that Catherine
Theot was a nuisance and a public danger, and must be arrested.
Robespierre, intensely susceptible to ridicule, not knowing what to do,
pettishly withdrew from the Convention, confined himself to his house
and the Jacobin Club