Our Jacobin sounding-board, therefore, does act!  Applauses heaven-high cover the rejected Oration; fire-eyed fury lights all Jacobin features:  Insurrection a sacred duty; the Convention to be purged; Sovereign People under Henriot and Municipality; we will make a new June-Second of it:  to your tents, O Israel!  In this key pipes Jacobinism; in sheer tumult of revolt.  Let Tallien and all Opposition men make off.  Collot d’Herbois, though of the supreme Salut, and so lately near shot, is elbowed, bullied; is glad to escape alive.  Entering Committee-room of Salut, all dishevelled, he finds sleek sombre Saint-Just there, among the rest; who in his sleek way asks, “What is passing at the Jacobins?”—­“What is passing?” repeats Collot, in the unhistrionic Cambyses’ vein:  “What is passing?  Nothing but revolt and horrors are passing.  Ye want our lives; ye shall not have them.”  Saint-Just stutters at such Cambyses’-oratory; takes his hat to withdraw.  That report he had been speaking of, Report on Republican Things in General we may say, which is to be read in Convention on the morrow, he cannot shew it them this moment:  a friend has it; he, Saint-Just, will get it, and send it, were he once home.  Once home, he sends not it, but an answer that he will not send it; that they will hear it from the Tribune to-morrow.

Let every man, therefore, according to a well-known good-advice, ’pray to Heaven, and keep his powder dry!’ Paris, on the morrow, will see a thing.  Swift scouts fly dim or invisible, all night, from Surete and Salut; from conclave to conclave; from Mother Society to Townhall.  Sleep, can it fall on the eyes of Talliens, Frerons, Collots?  Puissant Henriot, Mayor Fleuriot, Judge Coffinhal, Procureur Payan, Robespierre and all the Jacobins are getting ready.

Chapter 3.6.VII.

Go down to.

Tallien’s eyes beamed bright, on the morrow, Ninth of Thermidor ’about nine o’clock,’ to see that the Convention had actually met.  Paris is in rumour:  but at least we are met, in Legal Convention here; we have not been snatched seriatim; treated with a Pride’s Purge at the door.  “Allons, brave men of the Plain,” late Frogs of the Marsh! cried Tallien with a squeeze of the hand, as he passed in; Saint-Just’s sonorous organ being now audible from the Tribune, and the game of games begun.

Saint-Just is verily reading that Report of his; green Vengeance, in the shape of Robespierre, watching nigh.  Behold, however, Saint-Just has read but few sentences, when interruption rises, rapid crescendo; when Tallien starts to his feet, and Billaud, and this man starts and that,—­and Tallien, a second time, with his:  “Citoyens, at the Jacobins last night, I trembled for the Republic.  I said to myself, if the Convention dare not strike the Tyrant, then I myself dare; and with this I will do it, if need be,” said he, whisking out a clear-gleaming Dagger, and brandishing it there:  the Steel of