Released, however, as I was, from my bed, I was still a prisoner in the house, which I did not quit for a couple more months.
Meanwhile the Revolution was progressing.
The sight of the altar of the country, after the flight of the people from its steps, was terrible. It is said that the great mass of the dead lying bleeding upon that mighty structure was composed of women and children.
As the National Guard marched back to the city, after this massacre of many hundreds—a massacre which would have been multiplied by ten, had not Lafayette thrown himself before the cannon—they were greeted with low cries of “Murder!” “Murder!” “Vengeance!”
That day utterly parted the people from the thought of royalty. Paris was now ready to spill blood, for massacre would now take the name of vengeance. In many a street in the common parts of Paris were to be found the surviving relatives of those who had been slain. These were naturally prompted by a spirit of revenge—by a determination to pay blood with blood.
Nothing could wash out this hate—no words uttered by the weak and vacillating King could now stem the torrent of hate. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were already condemned to death in the hearts of the people. Nothing could save them.
The people were now ripe for rage, and therefore the terrible Danton gained power. The total reverse of Robespierre, they were to rise to power together. Robespierre was feeble, small, thin, and excessively temperate. Habitually, he ate little, drank water, and used perfumes when he was not surrounded by flowers; for he was as passionate an admirer of flowers as Mirabeau himself. Danton, on the other hand, was a huge monster—athletic, rude, coarse. He pleased the worst rabble of the city, because he resembled them. His eloquence was as thunder, and his very phrases were short, clear, and plain, like the words of a general accustomed to command. His very gestures intoxicated the people, who, however, more than by anything, were attracted by his wit, which, coarse, brutal, and often unjust, was never obscure, and always to the point. Men who went to hear his wit, remained to be converted to his ways of thinking.
His one quality was ambition—his one passion, excitement. He was quite devoid of honor, principles, or morality—he was already drunk with the Revolution; but it was a drunkenness which produced madness—not sleep. Moreover, he had the peculiar power of controlling himself even in his most excited moments—times when he would launch a bitter joke in the midst of his denunciations—a joke which should compel his hearers to yell with laughter, while he himself remained perfectly impassive. He laughed contemptuously at all honesty. He despised a man who could pity. In a word, he was a wild beast gifted with speech, but who could no more think beyond himself and his wants or desires, than can the beasts that perish.
The first great act of the people after the massacre upon the altar of the country, was the expression of a desire to honor the remains of Voltaire—the man whose writings, together with those of Rousseau, had actually sown the seed of revolution against that royalty which in Gaul and France had unceasingly mastered the people through two weary thousand years, before the death of Voltaire, in 1778—thirteen years before the events I am now recording. The power of the Court and the Church still maintained such sway over the minds and hearts of the people, that it was impossible to hope to bury the great man without creating a popular outrage. His nephew, therefore, secretly removed the body from Paris, where Voltaire died, and bore it far away to the Abbey of Sellières, in Champagne, where it found a resting-place.
Now it was the National Assembly ordered the removal of Voltaire’s remains to the Pantheon, the cathedral of philosophy, where lie buried many great men—that building upon the face of which has been carved “France, in gratitude to great men.”