across the morasses to Cobourg, but was evidently meaning to do it, and our Commissioners were off to arrest him; when what does the Girondin Lasource see good to do, but rise, and jesuitically question and insinuate at great length, whether a main accomplice of Dumouriez had not probably been—Danton! Gironde grins sardonic assent; Mountain holds its breath. The figure of Danton, Levasseur says, while this speech went on, was noteworthy. He sat erect with a kind of internal convulsion struggling to keep itself motionless; his eye from time to time flashing wilder, his lip curling in Titanic scorn.[1] Lasource, in a fine-spoken attorney manner, proceeds: there is this probability to his mind, and there is that; probabilities which press painfully on him, which cast the Patriotism of Danton under a painful shade;—which painful shade, he, Lasource, will hope that Danton may find it not impossible to dispel.
'Les Scélérats!' cries Danton, starting up, with clenched right-hand, Lasource having done; and descends from the Mountain, like a lava-flood: his answer not unready. Lasource's probabilities fly like idle dust; but leave a result behind them. 'Ye were right, friends of the Mountain,' begins Danton, 'and I was wrong: there is no peace possible with these men. Let it be war, then! They will not save the Republic with us: it shall be saved without them; saved in spite of them.' Really a burst of rude Parliamentary eloquence this; which is still worth reading in the old Moniteur. With fire-words the exasperated rude Titan rives and smites these Girondins; at every hit the glad Mountain utters chorus; Marat, like a musical bis, repeating the last phrase.[2] Lasource's probabilities are gone; but Danton's pledge of battle remains lying.
A third epoch, or scene in the Girondin Drama, or rather it is but the completion of this second epoch, we reckon from
