nstitutional Ark;
the entire Assembly rises in the presence of this sacred receptacle,
and allows the delegates to exhort it and instruct it concerning its
duties.[1142] But in the evening, at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre,
after a long and vague discourse on public dangers, conspiracies, and
traitors, suddenly utters the decisive words:

"The most important of my reflections was about to escape me[1143]...
The proposition made this morning will only facilitate the replacement
of the purified members of this Convention by the envoys of Pitt and
Cobourg."

Dreadful words in the mouth of a man of principles! They are at once
understood by the leaders, great and small, also by the selected fifteen
hundred Jacobins then filling the hall. "No! no! shouts the entire
club." The delegates are carried away:

"I demand," exclaims one of them, "that the dissolution of the
Convention be postponed until the end of the war."--

At last, the precious motion, so long desired and anticipated, is made:
the calumnies of the Girondins now fall the ground; it is demonstrated
that the Convention does not desire to perpetuate itself and that it has
no ambition; if it remains in power it is because it is kept there; the
delegates of the people compel it to stay.

And better still, they are going to mark out its course of action.--The
next day, the 12th of August, with the zeal of new converts, they spread
themselves through the hall in such numbers that Assembly, no longer
able to carry on is deliberations, crowds toward the left and yields
the whole of the space on the right that they may occupy and "purify"
it.[1144] All the combustible material in their minds, accumulated
during the past fortnight, takes fire and explodes; they are more
furious than the most ultra Jacobins; they repeat at the bar of the
house the extravagances of Rose Lacombe, and of the lowest clubs; they
even transcend the program drawn up by the "Mountain." "The time for
deliberation is past," exclaims their spokesman, "we must act[1145]...
Let the people rouse themselves in a mass... it alone can annihilate its
enemies... We demand that all 'suspects' be put under arrest; that
they be dispatched to the frontiers, followed by the terrible mass of
sans-culottes. There, in the front ranks, they will be obliged to fight
for that liberty which they have outraged for the past four years, or
be immolated on the tyrants' cannon.... Women, children, old men and
the infirm