do not as many as Seventy-two of the Departments, or say respectable Heads of Departments, declare for us?  Calvados, which loves its Buzot, will even rise in revolt, so hint the Addresses; Marseilles, cradle of Patriotism, will rise; Bourdeaux will rise, and the Gironde Department, as one man; in a word, who will not rise, were our Representation Nationale to be insulted, or one hair of a Deputy’s head harmed!  The Mountain, again, is strong as Reality and Audacity.  To the Reality of the Mountain are not all furthersome things possible?  A new Tenth of August, if needful; nay a new Second of September!—­

But, on Wednesday afternoon, twenty-fourth day of April, year 1793, what tumult as of fierce jubilee is this?  It is Marat returning from Revolutionary Tribunal!  A week or more of death-peril:  and now there is triumphant acquittal; Revolutionary Tribunal can find no accusation against this man.  And so the eye of History beholds Patriotism, which had gloomed unutterable things all week, break into loud jubilee, embrace its Marat; lift him into a chair of triumph, bear him shoulder-high through the streets.  Shoulder-high is the injured People’s-friend, crowned with an oak-garland; amid the wavy sea of red nightcaps, carmagnole jackets, grenadier bonnets and female mob-caps; far-sounding like a sea!  The injured People’s-friend has here reached his culminating-point; he too strikes the stars with his sublime head.

But the Reader can judge with what face President Lasource, he of the ‘painful probabilities,’ who presides in this Convention Hall, might welcome such jubilee-tide, when it got thither, and the Decreed of Accusation floating on the top of it!  A National Sapper, spokesman on the occasion, says, the People know their Friend, and love his life as their own; “whosoever wants Marat’s head must get the Sapper’s first.”  (Seance in Moniteur, No. 116, du 26 Avril, An 1er.) Lasource answered with some vague painful mumblement,—­which, says Levasseur, one could not help tittering at. (Levasseur, Memoires, i. c. 6.) Patriot Sections, Volunteers not yet gone to the Frontiers, come demanding the “purgation of traitors from your own bosom;” the expulsion, or even the trial and sentence, of a factious Twenty-two.

Nevertheless the Gironde has got its Commission of Twelve; a Commission specially appointed for investigating these troubles of the Legislative Sanctuary:  let Sansculottism say what it will, Law shall triumph.  Old-Constituent Rabaut Saint-Etienne presides over this Commission:  “it is the last plank whereon a wrecked Republic may perhaps still save herself.”  Rabaut and they therefore sit, intent; examining witnesses; launching arrestments; looking out into a waste dim sea of troubles.—­the womb of Formula, or perhaps her grave!  Enter not that sea, O Reader!  There are dim desolation and confusion; raging women and raging men.  Sections come demanding Twenty-two; for the number first given by Section Bonconseil still holds, though the names