Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/217

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TERRORISTS.
197

brought him back to Paris on the eve of the 10th Thermidor. He was on the committee of eight appointed by the Commune on the 9th to support Robespierre against the Convention. Six of the eight were foreigners. Robespierre, after much hesitation, was signing an insurrectionary address to the Section des Piques, when he was fired at and disabled. On the triumph of the Convention the "municipals," already outlawed, were executed without trial. Arthur apparently was in hiding till the 11th or 12th Thermidor, for he was guillotined, not with the eleven who accompanied Robespierre on the 10th, nor with the large batch of sixty-eight on the 11th, but with a third batch of ten on the 12th. He was thirty-three years of age, and seems to have been unmarried. One of his partners, Grenard, shared his fate, but Robert continued the business. The house was afterwards demolished in order to widen the street. Fanatic as he was, Arthur may be absolved from the horrible charge of devouring the heart of a Swiss killed in the defence of the Tuileries. This is one of the many legends of the Revolution which will not bear examination.

Arthur must have been confronted at the very climax of the struggle by a man like himself of British extraction, Auguste Rose, one of the ten ushers to the Convention. Stone had his letters from England sent under cover to Rose, perhaps to