It was Sunday morning, the 2nd of September. Verdun (though no one knew it yet in Paris) had just fallen; Beaurepaire was dead. The “Comité de Surveillance” of the Commune had admitted Marat illegally,[119] and for a sinister reason. For three days the prisons had been marked, and those whom the Comité wished to save had been withdrawn; and though the movement was spontaneous, though the most of the Sections spoke before Marat,[120] yet there was an executive and a directory, and that madman was its chief. The moment that the massacres were beginning at the Carmes, Danton was making the last effort to turn the anger of the moment into an enthusiasm for the Champ de Mars and for the volunteers. If ever there was an attempt to influence by rhetoric a popular emotion which could not be checked, and to direct energy from a destructive to a fruitful object, it is to be found in this his most famous speech—the speech that even the children know to-day in France, the closing words of which are engraved upon his pedestal. For the only time in his life he turned and leant upon the mere power of words: there is something in their extraordinary force which savours of despair, and they rise at the close to an untranslatable phrase in which you hear rhythm for the first and last time in his appeals: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace—et la France est sauvée.”[121] He did not wholly fail. When he had rung the great bell of the Hotel de Ville and had gone to the Champ de Mars, he looked over a great and growing crowd of young men running to the enlistment. But for four days—days in which he doggedly turned his back to the Commune which called him—the killing went on in the prisons. He and his volunteers, his silence, were most like this: a man in a mutiny on ship-board, in a storm at night, keeping the helm, saving what could be saved and careless whether the morning should make him seem a traitor on the one hand or a mutineer upon the other. For the tragedy of those five days—the days of Sedan—always seems to be passing in a thick night. We read records of action at this or that hour in the daylight, but we cannot believe the sun shone. Maillard, tall and pale in his close black serge and belt, is a figure for candles on the Abbaye table and for torches in the cloisters and the vaults. There never was a horror more germane to darkness.