"Born a beggar, your only hope of bread was crime. Adopting the profession of an advocate, your only conception of law was chicanery. Coming to Paris, you took up patriotism as a trade, and turned the trade into an imposture. Trained to dependence, you always hung on some one till he spurned you. You licked the dust before Mirabeau; you betrayed him, and he trampled on you; you took refuge in the cavern of Marat, until he found you too base even for his base companionship, and he, too, spurned you; you then clung to the skirts of Robespierre, and clung only to ruin. Viper! known only by your coils and your poison; like the original serpent, degraded even from the brute into the reptile, you already feel your sentence. I pronounce it before all. The man to whom you now cling will crush you. Maximilien Robespierre, is not your heel already lifted up to tread out the life of this traitor? Maximilien Robespierre," he repeated with a still more piercing sound, "do I not speak the truth?" "Have I not stripped the veil from your thoughts? Am I not looking on your heart?" He then addressed each of the Jacobin leaders in a brief appeal. "Billaud Varennes, stand forth--do you not long to drive your dagger into the bosom of this new tyrant? Collot d'Herbois, are you not sworn to destroy him? Couthon, have you not pronounced him perjured, perfidious, and unfit to live? St Just, have you not in your bosom the list of those who have pledged themselves that Danton shall never be Dictator; that his grave shall be dug before he shall tread on the first step of the throne; that his ashes shall be scattered to the four winds of heaven; that he shall never gorge on France?" A hollow murmur, like an echo of the vaults beneath, repeated the concluding words. The murmur had scarcely subsided when this extraordinary apparition, flinging round him a long white cloak, which he had hitherto carried on his arm, and which, in the dim light, gave him the look of one covered with a shroud, cried out in a voice of still deeper solemnity, "George Jacques Danton, you have this night pronounced the death of your king--I now pronounce your own. By the victims of the 20th of June--by the victims of the 10th of August--by the victims of the 2d of September--by the thousands whom your thirst of blood has slain--by the tens of thousands whom your treachery has sent to perish in a foreign grave--by the millions whom the war which you have kindled will lay in the field of slaughter--I cite you to appear before a tribunal, where sits a judge whom none can elude and none can defy. Within a year and a month, I cite you to meet the spirits of your victims before the throne of the Eternal." He stopped; not a voice was heard. He descended the steps of the Tribune, and stalked slowly through the hall; not a hand was raised against him. He pursued his way with as much calmness and security as if he had been a supernatural visitant, until he vanished in the darkness.