XVII.

History must have a sinister curiosity in ascertaining the first impression made on Madame Roland, by the man who, warmed at her hearth, and then conspiring with her, was one day to overthrow the power of his friends, immolate them en masse, and send her to the scaffold.  No repulsive feeling seems, at this period, to have warned her that in conspiring to advance Robespierre’s fortune, she conspired for her own death.  If she have any vague fear, that fear is instantly cloaked by a pity which is akin to contempt.  Robespierre appeared to her an honest man; she forgave him his evil tongue and affected utterance.  Robespierre, like all men with one idea, appeared overcome with ennui.  Still she had remarked that he was always deeply attentive at these committees, that he never spoke freely, listened to all other opinions before he delivered his own, and then never took the pains to explain his motives.  Like men of imperious temper, his conviction was to him always a sufficing reason.  The next day he entered the tribune, and profiting, for his reputation’s sake, by the confidential discussions to which he had listened in the previous evening, he anticipated the hour of action agreed upon with his allies, and thus divulged the plan concerted.  When blamed for this at Madame Roland’s, he made but slight excuse.  This wilfulness was attributed to his youth, and the impatience of his amour-propre.  Madame Roland, persuaded that this young man was passionately attached to liberty, took his reserve for timidity, and these petty treasons for independence.  The common cause was a cover for all.  Partiality transforms the most sinister tokens into favour or indulgence.  “He defends his principles,” said she, “with warmth and pertinacity—­he has the courage to stand up singly in their defence at the time when the number of the people’s champions is vastly reduced.  The court hates him, therefore we should like him.  I esteem Robespierre for this, and show him that I do; and then too, though he is not very attentive at the evening meetings, he comes occasionally and asks me to give him a dinner.  I was much struck with the affright with which he was agitated on the day of the king’s flight to Varennes.  He said the same evening at Petion’s that the Royal Family had not taken such a step without preparing in Paris a Saint Bartholomew for the patriots, and that he expected to die before he was twenty-four hours older.  Petion, Buzot, Roland, on the contrary, said that this flight of the king’s was his abdication, that it was necessary to profit by it in order to prepare men’s minds for the republic.  Robespierre, sneering and biting his nails, as usual, asked what a republic was.”

It was on this day that the plan of a journal, called the Republican, was arranged between Brissot, Condorcet, Dumont of Geneva, and Duchatelet.  We thus see that the idea of a republic was born in the cradle of the Girondists before it emanated from Robespierre, and that the 10th of August was no chance, but a plot.