But the attack came from the others. Within a week Lasource had proposed a guard for the Convention, “drawn from the departments;” and in the face of this proposition, that was almost civil war, Danton found himself able to speak once more for unity. The Girondins had elected one of themselves for president, and had chosen from among their own members the secretaries of the Assembly; they had wittingly ostracised the left, and they desired to make it dumb. Danton still attempted union. “I myself come from the Departments, from a place to which I always turn my eyes. But Paris is made of the Departments, and we are not here as members of this place or that, but as members for France.” He continually presented the idea of France united; the Girondins as continually rejected it. He knew that they thought him a shield for Marat; he rejected Marat openly from the tribune. But all this intense and personal action had but an effect upon individuals. Two especially it moved—Vergniaud, the young orator, sincere and brave beyond all his colleagues, and more far-seeing than any of the dreamers around him; Condorcet, to whom a year before Danton had seemed so repulsive, but whose calm and just mind had arrived at the truth; who had said, “Danton has that rare faculty of neither hating nor envying genius in others;” who had voted and spoken for his appointment as Minister of Justice, and who, up to the catastrophe of the following June, continued to understand and to support him. But, for the mass of the Girondins, he remained an outcast. He used words that one could not use before Roland’s wife, and the great group that surrounded her (men over-full of utopias, but heroic, men whom Danton himself regretted bitterly) made him an outcast. He replied often with passion, and once with insult, but as we shall see he did not abandon them entirely till the insurrection destroyed them in ’93.