The battle was closely joined. Desmoulins was pushing forward his attack with the audacious infantry of pamphlets; Danton, from the Convention, was giving from time to time the heavy blows of the artillery; the advance was continuous; when there was felt a check that proved the prelude to disaster and that showed, behind the opposing lines, the force of the Committees. In the middle of January, just after Desmoulins’s defence at the Jacobins, Fabre D’Eglantine, the friend and old secretary of Danton, was arrested. It was in vain that Danton put into his defence all the new energy which he had discovered in himself. It was in vain even that he called for “the right of the deputy to defend himself at the bar of the house.” Like all organised governments, the Committee could give reasons of State for this silent action. Danton was overborne, and the Convention for the first time since his return deserted him. He had yet seven weeks to live. Desmoulins still attacked, but Danton knew that the action was lost. He knew the strength of that powerful council whose first efforts he himself had moulded, and when he saw it arise in support of continuing the Terror, when he saw it and Robespierre allied, he lost hope. The policy of the Committee grew more and more definite. One member of it, (Hérault de Séchelles) was Danton’s friend: they expelled him. Silently, but with all their strength, they disengaged the government from either side. The Committee and Robespierre determined to strike at once, when the occasion should arise, both those in the Commune who desired to turn the Terror to their own ends and those of the Convention—the Dantonists, who desired to end it altogether. Danton still speaks in the tribune, but the attack is no longer there. He defends modestly and well the practical propositions that appear before the Parliament on education, on the abolition of slavery, on the provisions for the giving of bail under the new judiciary system, and so forth. But there is in his attitude something of expectancy. He is waiting for a sudden attack that must come and that he cannot prevent. He holds himself ready, but the Committee is working in the dark, and he does not know on which side to guard himself. A last personal interview with Robespierre failed, and there was nothing left to do but to wait and see whether they feared him so much as to dare his arrest. It was with Ventose, that is, with the first days of March, that the blow fell.