But now in such posture of affairs, virtuous Petion rose, next morning, to lament these effervescences, this endless Anarchy invading the Legislative Sanctuary itself; and here, being growled at and howled at by the Mountain, his patience, long tried, did, as we say, boil over; and he spake vehemently, in high key, with foam on his lips; ‘whence,’ says Marat, ’I concluded he had got ‘la rage,’ the rabidity, or dog-madness.  Rabidity smites others rabid:  so there rises new foam-lipped demand to have Anarchists extinguished; and specially to have Marat put under Accusation.  Send a Representative to the Revolutionary Tribunal?  Violate the inviolability of a Representative?  Have a care, O Friends!  This poor Marat has faults enough; but against Liberty or Equality, what fault?  That he has loved and fought for it, not wisely but too well.  In dungeons and cellars, in pinching poverty, under anathema of men; even so, in such fight, has he grown so dingy, bleared; even so has his head become a Stylites one!  Him you will fling to your Sword of Sharpness; while Cobourg and Pitt advance on us, fire-spitting?

The Mountain is loud, the Gironde is loud and deaf; all lips are foamy.  With ‘Permanent-Session of twenty-four hours,’ with vote by rollcall, and a dead-lift effort, the Gironde carries it:  Marat is ordered to the Revolutionary Tribunal, to answer for that February Paragraph of Forestallers at the door-lintel, with other offences; and, after a little hesitation, he obeys. (Moniteur, du 16 Avril 1793, et seqq.)

Thus is Danton’s battle-pledge taken up:  there is, as he said there would be, ‘war without truce or treaty, ni treve ni composition.’  Wherefore, close now with one another, Formula and Reality, in death-grips, and wrestle it out; both of you cannot live, but only one!

Chapter 3.3.VIII.

In Death-Grips.

It proves what strength, were it only of inertia, there is in established Formulas, what weakness in nascent Realities, and illustrates several things, that this death-wrestle should still have lasted some six weeks or more.  National business, discussion of the Constitutional Act, for our Constitution should decidedly be got ready, proceeds along with it.  We even change our Locality; we shift, on the Tenth of May, from the old Salle de Manege, into our new Hall, in the Palace, once a King’s but now the Republic’s, of the Tuileries.  Hope and ruth, flickering against despair and rage, still struggles in the minds of men.

It is a most dark confused death-wrestle, this of the six weeks.  Formalist frenzy against Realist frenzy; Patriotism, Egoism, Pride, Anger, Vanity, Hope and Despair, all raised to the frenetic pitch:  Frenzy meets Frenzy, like dark clashing whirlwinds; neither understands the other; the weaker, one day, will understand that it is verily swept down!  Girondism is strong as established Formula and Respectability: