Lo, before the fixed day, on the day which they call Eighth of Thermidor, 26th July 1794, Robespierre himself reappears in Convention; mounts to the Tribune!  The biliary face seems clouded with new gloom; judge whether your Talliens, Bourdons listened with interest.  It is a voice bodeful of death or of life.  Long-winded, unmelodious as the screech-owl’s, sounds that prophetic voice:  Degenerate condition of Republican spirit; corrupt moderatism; Surete, Salut Committees themselves infected; back-sliding on this hand and on that; I, Maximilien, alone left incorruptible, ready to die at a moment’s warning.  For all which what remedy is there?  The Guillotine; new vigour to the all-healing Guillotine:  death to traitors of every hue!  So sings the prophetic voice; into its Convention sounding-board.  The old song this:  but to-day, O Heavens! has the sounding-board ceased to act?  There is not resonance in this Convention; there is, so to speak, a gasp of silence; nay a certain grating of one knows not what!—­Lecointre, our old Draper of Versailles, in these questionable circumstances, sees nothing he can do so safe as rise, ‘insidiously’ or not insidiously, and move, according to established wont, that the Robespierre Speech be ‘printed and sent to the Departments.’  Hark:  gratings, even of dissonance!  Honourable Members hint dissonance; Committee-Members, inculpated in the Speech, utter dissonance; demand ‘delay in printing.’  Ever higher rises the note of dissonance; inquiry is even made by Editor Freron:  “What has become of the Liberty of Opinions in this Convention?” The Order to print and transmit, which had got passed, is rescinded.  Robespierre, greener than ever before, has to retire, foiled; discerning that it is mutiny, that evil is nigh.

Mutiny is a thing of the fatallest nature in all enterprises whatsoever; a thing so incalculable, swift-frightful; not to be dealt with in fright.  But mutiny in a Robespierre Convention, above all,—­it is like fire seen sputtering in the ship’s powder-room!  One death-defiant plunge at it, this moment, and you may still tread it out:  hesitate till next moment,—­ship and ship’s captain, crew and cargo are shivered far; the ship’s voyage has suddenly ended between sea and sky.  If Robespierre can, to-night, produce his Henriot and Company, and get his work done by them, he and Sansculottism may still subsist some time; if not, probably not.  Oliver Cromwell, when that Agitator Serjeant stept forth from the ranks, with plea of grievances, and began gesticulating and demonstrating, as the mouthpiece of Thousands expectant there,—­discerned, with those truculent eyes of his, how the matter lay; plucked a pistol from his holsters; blew Agitator and Agitation instantly out.  Noll was a man fit for such things.

Robespierre, for his part, glides over at evening to his Jacobin House of Lords; unfolds there, instead of some adequate resolution, his woes, his uncommon virtues, incorruptibilities; then, secondly, his rejected screech-owl Oration;—­reads this latter over again; and declares that he is ready to die at a moment’s warning.  Thou shalt not die! shouts Jacobinism from its thousand throats.  “Robespierre, I will drink the hemlock with thee,” cries Painter David, “Je boirai la cigue avec toi;”—­a thing not essential to do, but which, in the fire of the moment, can be said.