CHAPTER III
DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS
A man who is destined to represent at any moment the chief energies of a nation, especially a man who will not only represent but lead, must, by his nature, follow the national methods on his road to power.
His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction of the national energies, and must merge with their main current at an imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who deliberately plan success that they will not leave themselves amenable to such influences, and it is the most frequent cause of their failure. Thus such men as arrive at great heights of power are most often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and original, but, at the same time, yielding unconsciously to an environment with which they sympathise, or to which they were born.
It is not difficult to determine the accidents of action, temperament, and locality which predispose to success in one’s own society. It is less easy to appreciate what corresponds to them under foreign conditions.
It was seen in the first chapter that Paris sums up in herself those conditions in the case of the French nation; and it was seen also (a point of peculiar importance) that Paris at the close of the eighteenth century was ill at ease—out of herself, demanding her place and yet anxious as to the means by which it might be attained.
It might be imagined that this was a kind of usurpation. Such a belief is entertained by most foreigners, and certainly it has not been lacking among the more idealist of the French Republicans. Nevertheless, such a view is erroneous, and the Girondists, for all their virtues, went (as we shall discover) against the nature of things when they would have made of Paris but one of the cities, or rather but “an aliquot voting part” of the nation. The demand of Paris was essentially reasonable, and had to be satisfied. Why? Because without her leadership not this thing or that thing would have been done, but nothing would have been done. The crowds who waited round the coaching inns in the country towns for news of the city in the great early days of ’89, by their very attitude asked and expected Paris to move.
Paris, then, is Danton’s gate. It is up the flood of the Parisian tide that he floats. That tide rises much higher than even he had thought possible, and it throws him at last on the high inaccessible place of the 10th of August. Once there, from a pinnacle he sees all France. Just as Cromwell was the Puritan soldier till he reached power, and then became, or desired to become, the representative of England, so Danton is the Parisian Frondeur till from a place of responsibility and direction he aims partly at the realisation of French ideas, but mainly at the integrity and salvation of France itself.
Here he is, then, in the two years of active discussion that precede the elections, by an accident of ambition, Parisian; one of a group of young provincial lawyers, but the most successful of them all. Some months after his marriage, in the course of 1788[33] (we are not certain of the exact date), he moved into the house in which he lived to his death, six angry years. It was the corner house of the Cour du Commerce and the Rue des Cordeliers.[34] The house was better than that which he had inhabited in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, when he bought his practice; on the other hand, it was in a somewhat less expensive neighbourhood. We may justly infer, however, from the greater size of his new apartments, and from the fact that he kept his office still in the old house in the Rue de la Tixanderie, just behind the Hotel de Ville, that he had prospered in his profession, and the inference is sustained by our knowledge of the importance of his cases and his clients. As to the exact situation which he chose, it was doubtless determined by its proximity to the apartments of his friends. Here lived Desmoulins, his chief friend, a year younger than himself, coming (after his marriage in 1790) to live in the same house; for then, as now, in Paris it was not the habit to take a whole house but a flat, and Danton was on the first, Desmoulins on the second floor. Just across the river, over the Pont Neuf, was the café on the Quai de l’École which his father-in-law had kept, and above all, he was here in the midst of the youth of the schools. It was the slope of the famous hill of the University. Close by he would find the Café Procope, of which Desmoulins had written with such enthusiasm, which had once been illuminated with the little smile of Voltaire, which had heard the assertion of Diderot, and which in 1788 was noisy every night with discussion and speech and applause. All that atmosphere of debate which comes unconsciously to young men learning rose on the sides of the Mont Parnasse and centred in the room; and here in the winter of the year, in a society so entirely of his own rank that the high bourgeoisie and the noblesse knew nothing of its power, his great voice and generous face filled the circle with their energy. But there was yet no dream of revolution, still less of violence. France was waiting for great things, but they were to come of themselves, or on the wave of universal enthusiasm. The fire, however, was lit, and the group which afterwards passed from the Montagne to the scaffold of Germinal was already formed.
To all this, however, which was but the relaxation of an abundant spirit, must be added days of continual and serious work on the other side of the river. If his nights were in the Latin Quarter, his days were in the office of the Rue de la Tixanderie. A minister of the crown[35] does not intrust his family affairs to such a wastrel as the chance memoirs of opponents would make of Danton at this period, nor a lawyer who is never in his chambers, but gadding about politicising, get the conduct of one of the most important Chancery cases of his day.
There is one matter in these pre-revolutionary months which is of no very great importance, but which is well worth noticing, though the confusion apparent in our one account of it has lessened its value. There can be no doubt that Barentin, apart from his business relations, was personally intimate with Danton; and when that careful and moderate man had succeeded Lamoignon in September 1788, there was some kind of informal offer made to Danton of what we should call an official secretaryship to the minister[36]—or rather we have no name for it, for the ministry in France was not associated with legislation, but only with executive power, and therefore positions in its gifts had not the political importance they have with us.