e
Committee of Public Safety to determine that Marie Antoinette should be
sent to the scaffold. Barere was again summoned to his duty. Only four
days after he had proposed the decrees against the Girondist deputies he
again mounted the tribune, in order to move that the Queen should be
brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was improving fast in the
society of his new allies. When he asked for the heads of Vergniaud and
Petion he had spoken like a man who had some slight sense of his own
guilt and degradation: he had said little; and that little had not been
violent. The office of expatiating on the guilt of his old friends he
had left to St. Just. Very different was Barere's second appearance in
the character of an accuser. He now cried out for blood in the eager
tones of the true and burning thirst, and raved against the Austrian
woman with the virulence natural to a coward who finds himself at
liberty to outrage that which he has feared and envied. We have already
exposed the shameless mendacity with which, in these Memoirs, he
attempts to throw the blame of his own guilt on the guiltless.

On the day on which the fallen Queen was dragged, already more than half
dead, to her doom Barere regaled Robespierre and some other Jacobins at
a tavern. Robespierre's acceptance of the invitation caused some
surprise to those who knew how long and how bitterly it was his nature
to hate. "Robespierre of the party!" muttered St. Just. "Barere is the
only man whom Robespierre has forgiven." We have an account of this
singular repast from one of the guests. Robespierre condemned the
senseless brutality with which Hebert had conducted the proceedings
against the Austrian woman, and, in talking on that subject, became so
much excited that he broke his plate in the violence of his
gesticulation. Barere exclaimed that the guillotine had cut a diplomatic
knot which it might have been difficult to untie. In the intervals
between the beaune and the champagne, between the ragout of thrushes and
the partridge with truffles, he fervently preached his new political
creed. "The vessel of the revolution," he said, "can float into port
only on waves of blood. We must begin with the members of the National
Assembly and of the Legislative Assembly. That rubbish must be swept
away."

As he talked at table he talked in the Convention. His peculiar style of
oratory was now formed. It was not altogether without ingenuity and
liveliness. But in