He was also secure in that which mattered so much more to him—I mean in his home. His mind had sufficiently steadied after the shock that had maddened him in February for him to follow the advice which his dead wife had left him. On the 17th of June he re-married. The woman was not suited to Danton. She did not love him, nor probably did he love her. There were two young children, whom, in the winter, his first wife, finding herself to be dying, felt she was leaving orphans. The eldest was only three years old. This good woman, Catholic and devout, knowing her husband, and the sheer necessity for a home which his character had shown, determined on a religious education for her sons, and determined on a Catholic woman to be about her husband. She urged him to marry her younger friend, Mdlle. Gély. An incident, which is doubtful, but which, on the whole, I accept, does not seem to me to prove the violence of an uncontrolled affection, but, on the contrary, to show a kind of indifference, as though Danton said to himself, “The thing must be done, and had better be done so as to offend the family as little as possible.” I mean the story of his marriage before a non-juring priest. At any rate, that marriage shows an element of determination and security. He was still master of his fortunes and of himself. But he had called up a spirit too strong for him. July was to prove it. June, which had seen the rise of the Girondin insurrection, had also seen its partial appeasement and suppression. It was, as we have said, the Constitution, hurriedly improvised for this purpose, that had been the main cause of such a success, but there remained for July, more dangerous than ever, the foreign invasion and the three outstanding strongholds of the civil war—Lyons, Toulon, and La Vendée. It was against them and their growing success, against the rebels and the invaders, that the Terror was serviceable, and it was on account of their continual progress that the Terror assumed such fearful proportions. I said earlier in this chapter that Danton inaugurating and strengthening the dictatorship of the Revolutionary Government was like a man deliberately opening a sluice behind which was the whole sea. There was an element of uncertainty upon the chances of which he had staked the success of his effort, and, with the reverses, he soon discovered that the forces which he had let loose were going beyond him. It may be that he thought the results of the 2nd of June would be more immediate than they were. As a fact, it took many months to recover the position which the supineness of the Girondins had lost. In those months the Revolutionary Government crystallised, as it were, became permanent, and fell into the hands of the extremists.