besought Robespierre to show mercy, but “the Incorruptible was inflexible.”  Then the “Lion Amoureux” roared, being, as the legend relates, stricken to the heart at the appalling danger to which his beloved mistress was exposed or, as his detractors put the case, being in deadly fear that the untoward revelations of the Citoyenne might cost him his own head.  The next act in this Aeschylean drama is described by the believers in the legend in the following words:  “Tallien drew Theresia’s dagger from his breast and flashed it in the sunlight as though to nerve himself for the desperate business that confronted him.  ‘This,’ he cried passionately, ‘will be my final argument,’ and looking about him to make sure he was alone he raised the blade to his lips and kissed it.”

The result, it is alleged, was that Tallien provoked the episode of the 9th Thermidor (July 22, 1794).  The few faltering sentences which Robespierre wished to utter were never spoken.  He was “choked by the blood of Danton,” and hurried off to the guillotine which awaited him on the morrow.

History, which in this instance is not legendary, relates that on the death of the tyrant a wild shout of exultation was raised by the joyous people who had for so long wandered in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  To whom, they asked, did they owe their liberty?  What was more natural than to assume that it was to the brave Tallien and to the loving woman who armed him to strike a blow for the freedom of France?  Tallien and his mistress became, therefore, the idols of the French people.  The Chancellor Pasquier relates their appearance at a theatre: 

The enthusiasm and the applause were indescribable.  The occupants of the boxes, the people in the pit, men and women alike, stood up on their chairs to look at him.  It seemed as though they would never weary of gazing at him.  He was young, rather good-looking, and his manner was calm and serene.  Madame Tallien was at his side and shared his triumph.  In her case also everything had been forgiven and forgotten.  Similar scenes were enacted all through the autumn of that year.  Never was any service, however great, rewarded by gratitude so lively and so touching.

It would be impossible within the limits of the present article to summarise the arguments by which M. Gastine seeks to destroy this myth.  Allusion may, however, be made to two points of special importance.  The first is that neither Tallien nor the lovely Spaniard languishing in the dungeon of La Force had much to do with the episode of the 9th Thermidor.  “Tallien was a mere super, a mere puppet that had to be galvanised into action up to the very last.”  The man who really organised the movement and persuaded his coadjutors that they were engaged in a life and death struggle with Robespierre was he who, as every reader of revolutionary history knows, was busily engaged in pulling the strings behind the scenes during the whole of this chaotic period.  It was the man whose iron nerve and subtle brain enabled him, in spite of a secular course of betrayals, to keep his head on his shoulders, and finally to escape the clutches of Napoleon, who, as Lord Rosebery tells us,[89] always deeply regretted that he had not had him “hanged or shot.”  It was Fouche.