But why did Danton not save the prisoners? I know that question is usually answered by saying that he was indifferent. So much (it seems to me) survives of a legend. For history no longer pretends that he organised or directed the crime. Indeed, history finds it daily more difficult, as the details accumulate, to fix it upon any one man. But the fact that he persistently defended the extremists in the following month, that he made himself (for the purposes of reunion) an advocate for many men who were blameworthy, and tried to reconcile the pure minds of the Girondins with such terrible memories—in a word, the fact that for months he sacrificed himself in the Convention, that he demanded union, has condemned him to every suspicion. _Que mon nom soit flétri et que la France soit libre._ He might, indeed, have spoken. Popular, the one vigorous and healthy personality in the face of Paris, he might have bent his energy to the single aim of preventing an outbreak. I will not deny that in his mind, over which we have seen passionate anger falling suddenly in October 1789 and in June 1792, there may have arisen some such feeling as that which restrained the vast mass of the Parisians from interfering with the little band of murderers—a feeling of violent hatred, a memory of the manifesto and a disgust which made the partisans of Brunswick seem like vermin. There is something of that deplorable temper in the anecdote which Madame Roland gives of him, striding through the rooms on the second day and saying that the prisoners “could save themselves.” But this anecdote is not history; it is an accusation, and one made by a partisan and an enemy.[122] There is another and better reason for his action, which must, I think, have made the greater part of his motive. To have spoken would have been to play a very heavy stake. If he spoke and failed to prevent the rising, he ceased to be Danton. His influence fell, he became a Moderate, and himself, the one man left to direct affairs, entered the confused ranks of opposition—un-Parisian, rejected of either party, while France beneath him fell into mere anarchy. It would have been gambling with all that he most desired: the English neutrality, the union of the coming Parliament, the rapid organisation of the armies, all this staked to win something that was not precious to him at all—the lives of a mass of men the bulk of whom had demanded the success of the invasion.