VOLUME III
CHAPTER I
ROBESPIERRE'S CHARACTER.
We will now jump over a space of nearly three months, and leaving the
chateaux of royalist La Vendee, plunge for a short while into the heart
of republican Paris. In the Rue St. Honore lived a cabinet-maker, named
Duplay, and in his house lodged Maximilian Robespierre, the leading
spirit in the latter and more terrible days of the Revolution. The time
now spoken of was the beginning of October, 1793; and at no period did
the popularity and power of that remarkable man stand higher.
The whole government was then vested in the Committee of Public
Safety--a committee consisting of twelve persons, members of the
Convention, all of course ultra-democrats, over the majority of whom
Robespierre exercised a direct control. No despot ever endured ruled
with so absolute and stringent a dominion as that under which this body
of men held the French nation. The revolutionary tribunal was now
established in all its horror and all its force. A law was passed by the
Convention, in September, which decreed that all suspected people should
be arrested and brought before this tribunal; that nobles, lawyers,
bankers, priests, men of property, and strangers in the land, should be
suspected unless known to be acting friends and adherents of the
ultra-revolutionary party; that the punishment of such persons should
be death; and that the members of any revolutionary tribunal which had
omitted to condemn any suspected person, should themselves be tried, and
punished by death.
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