Committee of Public Salvation ride this whirlwind; stranger set of cloud-compellors Earth never saw.  Convention commissioners fly to all points of the territory, powerfuller than king or kaiser; frenzy of patriotism drives our armies victorious, one nation against the whole world; crowned by the Vengeur, triumphant in death; plunging down carrying vive la Republique along with her into eternity, in Howe’s victory of the First of June.  Alas, alas! a myth, founded, like the world itself, on Nothing!

Of massacring, altar-robbing, Hebertism, is there beginning to be a sickening?  Danton, Camille Desmoulins are weary of it; the Hebertists themselves are smitten; nineteen of them travel their last road in the tumbrils.  “We should not strike save where it is useful to the Republic,” says Danton; quarrels with Robespierre; Danton, Camille, others of the friends of mercy are arrested.  At the trial, he shivers the witnesses to ruin thunderously; nevertheless, sentence is passed.  On the scaffold he says, “Danton, no weakness!  Thou wilt show my head to the people—­it is worth showing.”  So passes this Danton; a very man; fiery-real, from the great fire-bosom of nature herself.

Foul Hebert and the Hebertists, great Danton and the Dantonists, are gone, swift, ever swifter, goes the axe of Samson; Death pauses not.  But on Prairial 20, the world is in holiday clothes in the Jardin National.  Incorruptible Robespierre, President of the Convention, has decreed the existence of the Supreme Being; will himself be priest and prophet; in sky-blue coat and black breeches!  Nowise, however, checking the guillotine, going ever faster.

On July 26, when the Incorruptible addresses the Convention, there is dissonance.  Such mutiny is like fire sputtering in the ship’s powder-room.  The Convention then must be purged, with aid of Henriot.  But next day, amid cries of Tyranny!  Dictatorship! the Convention decrees that Robespierre “is accused”; with Couthon and St. Just; decreed “out of law”; Paris, after brief tumult, sides with the Convention.  So on July 28, 1794, the tumbrils go with this motley batch of outlaws.  This is the end of the Reign of Terror.  The nation resolves itself into a committee of mercy.

Thenceforth, writ of accusation and legal proof being decreed necessary, Fouquier’s trade is gone; the prisons deliver up suspects.  For here was the end of the revolution system.  The keystone being struck out, the whole arch-work of Sansculottism began to crack, till the abyss had swallowed it all.

And still there is no bread, and no constitution; Paris rises once again, flowing towards the Tuileries; checked in one day with two blank cannon-shots, by Pichegru, conqueror of Holland.  Abbe Sieyes provides yet another constitution; unpleasing to sundry who will not be dispersed.  To suppress whom, a young artillery officer is named commandant; who with whiff of grapeshot does very promptly suppress them; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space.