De Molleville begins by making the sum 500,000 francs. It seems enormous. It is a sum which no man could receive and spend in a few days’ debauch without attracting the attention of the whole city, which no man could invest without leaving some obvious accession of property, and he puts the receipt of this sum as coming under Montmorin’s ministry—that is, at a time when public order was secured, when the course of the registries, the transmission of property and so forth, were in the fullest light.
He gives the name of the man who handed him the sum, and calls him Durand. On this point it is impossible to say yes or no, but we can say with absolute certitude that the incident of the letter upon which Bertrand de Molleville makes the whole matter turn, is an untruth added to an untruth. In the first place, he makes Danton “violent in his demands against the king.” This accusation is absolutely false.
When the trial of the king was mooted, Danton did speak (notably on the 6th of September), with some decision in favour of the king’s being brought to trial upon particular points. He expressed himself in that speech with very great energy upon this particular feature of the trial, that the king merited condemnation because he had obviously and openly betrayed the nation,—a thing which nobody doubted, which nobody denied, and which Louis himself and his advisers would simply have met by saying (at a later epoch of course), “We called in the foreigner as a necessary police in the time of anarchy; we desired to save France by its betrayal.” So far, however, from Danton being a leader of the attack on Louis or of the demand for his trial, that attack and that demand were as spontaneous as anything the Convention ever did; and Danton followed rather than led, as a glance at the Moniteur can prove.
In the much more important debates wherein the life of Louis was first implicitly and then explicitly at stake, Danton was absent, and in the days of November there is no question at all but that Danton’s one preoccupation was to reconcile the Mountain with the Girondins.
De Molleville goes on to give his letter a date—such things are done on purpose, as a rule, in order to give a special character of legal evidence to one’s accusations. He says that he wrote the letter on the 11th of December, that Danton on receiving the letter was frightened, and without replying to it got himself put upon the mission to the army of the North.
Now Danton left for the army of the North on the 1st of December, and if the letter was written at all (which I doubt), it was written at a time when Danton, being absent, could not possibly have acted as De Molleville said he did. He could not have “asked” to go on a mission (he did not ask, but was sent), and have started on the 1st in consequence of a letter written on the 11th.
Finally, De Molleville says he came back to vote on the punishment of the king, but had been coerced by the letter into merely voting for death without giving his opinion. This again is a lie. If there is anything remarkable to the historian in the vote Danton gave on the 16th January 1793, and in the speech which he made before his vote, it is that he, by nature so wary, should have discovered in this crisis a violent manifestation of opinion and motive. I have amply shown in the text that we could only reconcile those abnormal days in Danton’s life by some extreme shock to the emotions. Some represent him as suffering a violent rebuff from his political opponents; some consider the scene of misery and impending death which he found in his home on returning from his long journey. He demanded a simple majority vote; he spoke violently against the appeal to the people; and when he voted for the death of the king he turned to the Right and said, “I am not a statesman; I am not one of those who are ignorant of the duty of not compromising with tyrants, and who do not know that kings can only be struck on the head, who do not know that we can expect nothing from the kings of Europe save by force and by arms. I vote for the death of the tyrant.”
If these are the words, and if that is the action of a man terrorised by a letter into a silent and furtive vote, then evidence has no meaning.
De Molleville, I think, can in this, as in nearly all his historical evidence (with the exception of that which turns upon the personal habits of the king, where he has the details of a valet), be dismissed.
With Lafayette, again, we have that half-truth and half-lie which runs through all his accusations. “The receipt for 100,000 francs was in the hands of Montmorin.” This was true. The sum was not quite 100,000, it was 61,000 (Appendix VI.); but the receipt did exist, and to any one who did not know that all the men occupying positions on the Council had been reimbursed, it might look like a receipt for a bribe, or might be twisted into meaning such. It is impossible for us to discover whether Lafayette meant to tell an untruth, as we can prove De Molleville did; he may in this matter have been perfectly loyal, for there was a note found among his papers after his death (Memoirs, iii. 84-85), saying that “a position on the Councils was only worth 10,000, and had been reimbursed at 100,000 as a bribe.” We now know from the discovery of so many receipts that from 60,000 to 80,000 was the regular price of reimbursements, but Lafayette might easily have been ignorant of this, and have jumped to a false conclusion.