Danton. The danger is in the famine which caused the bag-porter Blin to hang the baker of the market Palu, François Denis, to the lantern of the Hotel de Ville, and in the justice which hung the bag-porter Blin for having hung the baker Denis. The danger is in the paper money, which is depreciating. An assignat of a hundred francs fell on the ground in Rue du Temple, and a passer-by, a man of the people, said: "It is not worth the trouble of picking it up." The stockjobbers and the monopolists, there lies the danger! To hang the black flag from the Hôtel de Ville, a fine step! You arrest the Baron of Trenck, that is not enough. I would have the neck of that old prison intriguer wrung. Do you think you have escaped from the difficulty because the president of the Convention placed a civic crown on the head of Labertèche who received forty-one sabre cuts at Jemmapes, and whose eulogist Chénier became? Comedies and jugglery. Ah! you do not look at Paris! Ah! you look for the danger from afar, when it is near at hand. What good does your police do, Robespierre? For you have your spies: Payan, in the Commune; Coffinhal, in the Revolutionary Tribunal; David, in the Committee of General Safety; Couthon, in the Committee of Public Welfare. You see that I am informed. Well, know this: the danger is above your heads, the danger is under your feet; conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy; the people in the streets read the papers together, and shake their heads at one another; six thousand men, without tickets of civism—returned refugees, Muscadins, and Mathevons,—are concealed in cellars and attics, and in the wooden galleries of the Palais-Royal; people form a line in the baker's shop; good women wring their hands on the doorsteps, saying: "When shall we have peace?" It is of no use for you to shut yourselves up in the hall of the Executive Counsel to be by yourselves, for all that you say is known; and to prove it, Robespierre, here are the words you said last evening to Saint-Just: "Barbaroux is beginning to have a big belly, which will hinder him in his flight." Yes, the danger is everywhere, and, above all, at the centre. In Paris the ex-nobles plot, the patriots go barefooted, the aristocrats, arrested the ninth of March, are already released. The splendid horses, which ought to be put to the cannons on the frontier.
