Such measures as those which “the twelve” had decreed were but fuel for the insurrectionary flame. Once more Danton appears, this time against the Gironde. To the demand for a large guard drawn from the Departments he said, “You are decreeing that you are afraid!” Whereupon a voice from the right cried with some humour, “I am.” Danton had his way, the guard was not formed, and on the following day (the 25th of May) Isnard’s imprudence brought on the catastrophe. It was in the matter of the petition for the release of Hébert. Isnard rose in the chair, lifted his hand, and pronounced in his hollow voice the words that have enriched history at the expense of his country: “If such a thing should happen as an attempt upon the representatives of the nation, I say to you, in the name of all France, that very soon men would search upon the banks of the Seine for proofs that Paris had once been there.” Danton intervened, but he could do nothing. The glove had been thrown down. He asked for the withdrawal of those words; the Girondin majority reaffirmed them. Two days later he obtained the freedom of Hébert; but though for a moment he was promised the dissolution of the “Commission of the Twelve,” his effort failed, for they were immediately reinstated. In the night between the 30th and the 31st of May the Sections named a new and insurrectionary Commune; for one day the danger was warded off, and you may see Danton, still so difficult to understand, urging the Committee, while Barrère is proposing the conciliatory message to France, a document which blamed neither the Girondins nor Paris, and the twelve were dissolved. But the final blow was not to be avoided. On the 2nd of June the news of the counter-revolution in Lyons reached Paris. The Convention was surrounded; Henriot, at the head of the city militia, guarded its approaches, lined the corridors. Even in that moment, when Isnard proposed to retire, and made his superb apology, the Gironde, as a whole, stood firm. The inflexible Jansenist, Lanjuinais, proposed, with heroic folly, “a decree dissolving the authorities of Paris,” at a moment when these very authorities were holding the doors with fixed bayonets; but in spite of Barrère’s demand for Henriot’s condemnation, in spite of Danton’s demand for “a signal punishment,” the Convention yielded, voted the arrest not only of the twenty-two, whom the Commune had demanded, but of twenty-nine, and Vergniaud, Barbaroux, Guadet; Le Brun, and Clavière (who were nominally ministers); Roland (who had fled, and whose wife was imprisoned by the Commune)—in fine, the whole body of those great orators who had made the Republic—were thrust out of the Assembly, some to be held in the honourable confinement of their own houses, some to fly and raise civil war in the Departments. The Commune offered hostages in equal number, but they were refused; and before the day was over the Parliament was mutilated, and the obstacle to