I have been unable to find any mention of the rental which was paid, but a guess at something like £150 a year in that quarter at that time for such a flat would, I think, not be extravagant. The corresponding flat above, Desmoulins took after his romantic marriage in December 1790, but he did not begin to occupy the house until the early part of 1791. It was here that his little Horace was born; it was here that his wife and Danton’s passed the terrible night of the 10th of August, and it was here, in the great bedroom overlooking the Rue des Cordeliers, that Danton’s wife died in February 1793.
As to the furniture of the little apartment, it may be described as follows:—The drawing-room was not very large, but there had been spent upon it the most considerable sum in the furnishing of the house. It figures for very nearly a third in the valuation, which may be read in [Appendix VII.] The white furniture, which was the mark of the eighteenth century, was its principal note; it is also worth observing that the household was sufficiently cramped for room to use the cupboards in the drawing-room as wardrobes. The principal bedroom was well furnished, but, as you will find to be the case in such houses in Paris, the study, the dining-room, and the spare room to the side of the study were very bare. It is also remarkable that the lumber-room held nothing but two trunks and an old double bedstead. It was the household of a man who made every effort to maintain his position before his wife’s friends, but who was not wealthy, and who had evidently arranged the scale of his expenditure considerably below the probable receipts which an office such as his would have brought in. I should much doubt whether as much as £500 a year would go out on such an establishment, though he was certainly receiving £1000. We know the reason of this; he had to pay off by every means in his power the debt which he had incurred in buying the practice. While he lived in this house, and until the office was suppressed in 1790, he continued to keep his business rooms in the Rue de la Tissanderie. It may be worthy of mention that he kept two servants, and that his apartment was on the first, whilst that of Desmoulins was on the second floor of the house.
As to the Cordeliers, on which the preceding note is written, the hall in which their meetings were first held still exists (as we have said in the text) under the title of Musée Dupuytren. The Church of the Cordeliers, into which they afterwards moved, has disappeared, but the last locale of the club (when the Municipality had turned them out of the church in 1791) still remains, and is to be discovered at No. 105 Rue Thionville. Danton’s father-in-law had been master of a café on the Quai de l’École. This house still remains. If I am not mistaken, it was altered slightly during the restorations of the Second Empire. It is the house which now stands at the south-western corner of the Place de l’École, and which faces the quai on one side and the square on the other. The street and quay outside M. Charpentier’s café was, however, somewhat oblique to the modern street, and ran less east than west, more south-east than north-west, than it does to-day.
The quay has been raised and the old fountain in the Place de l’École destroyed. Otherwise the quarter is much the same. The café became famous later for its draught players, a reputation that still continues.
III
NOTE ON THE SUPPOSED VENALITY OF DANTON
I will not go in this note into any of the general considerations which have led the greater part of modern historians to reject the legend of Danton’s venality. These general considerations are by far the strongest arguments upon which we can rely in this matter, but I trust that the character which I have attempted to draw in the text of the book will furnish them in sufficiency.
Neither do I desire to insist in this note upon the unquestionable value of the two principal modern authorities in England and in France (Mr. Morse Stephens and M. Aulard), who both of them regard the question as finally settled in Danton’s favour. I have insisted sufficiently upon this in the text. What I shall attempt to do is to quote the contemporary accusations, to determine how much reliance can be placed upon them, to show their character, and to describe in what way and to what extent they are explained by documents which have since come to light.
First of all, a list of those contemporaries who took his venality for certain. It is very formidable.
Mirabeau (letter to Lamarck, Thursday, 10th March 1791).—... “Montmorin has told me ... of particular schemes ... for instance, that Beaumetz and ... D’Andrée dined yesterday alone and got Danton’s confidence ... and then proposed to demolish Vincennes in order to make themselves popular. Danton got 30,000 livres yesterday, and I have the proof that Danton inspired the last number of Desmoulins’ paper.... If it is possible I intend to risk 6000 livres, but at any rate they will be more innocently distributed than the 30,000 livres of Danton.” Here is a categorical statement in which a man says what the court had often said (and Mirabeau was then an agent of the court), “I have managed Danton at such and such a price,” and the passage gives us indirectly the name of Montmorin. The date should be noted.