Desmoulins heard the butts falling together on the flagstones, and the little clink of metal which announces soldiery; he turned to his wife and said, “They have come to arrest me.” And she held to him till she fainted and was carried away. Danton, in his study alone, met the arrest without words. There is hardly a step in the tragedy that follows which is not marked by his comment, always just, sometimes violent; but the actual falling of the blow led to no word. Words were weapons with him, and he was not one to strike before he had put up his guard. They were taken to the Luxembourg, very close by, a little up the hill. We have the story of how Danton came with his ample, firm presence into the hall of the prison, and met, almost the first of his fellow-prisoners, Thomas Paine. The author of “The Rights of Man” stepped up to him, doubtless to address him in bad French.[140] Danton forestalled him in the English of which he was a fair master. “Mr. Paine,” he said, “you have had the happiness of pleading in your country a cause which I shall no longer plead in mine.” He remembered Paine’s sane and moderate view on the occasion of the king’s trial, and he envied one whose private freedom had remained untrammelled with the bonds of office; who had never been forced to a 2nd of June, nor had to keep to an intimate conversation his fears for the Girondins. Then he added that if they sent him to the scaffold he would go gaily. And he did. There was the Frenchman contrasted with his English friend. Beaulieu, who heard him, tells us that he also turned to the prisoners about him and said, “Gentlemen, I had hoped to have you out of this, and here I am myself; I can see no issue.” So the prisoners came in, anxiously watched by reactionaries, to whom, as to many of our modern scribblers, one leader of the Revolution is as good as another—Lacroix, Westermann (the strong soldier with his huge frame overtopping even Danton’s), and Desmoulins. As they passed to their separate cells, for it was determined to prevent their communication, a little spirit of the old evil[141] used the powerful venom of aristocracy, the unanswerable repartee of rank, and looking Lacroix up and down, said, “I could make a fine coachman of that fellow.” He and his like would have ruined France for the sake of turning those words into action. Till the dawn of the 11th Germinal broke, they were kept in their separate rooms. But the place was not built for a prison. Lacroix and Danton in neighbouring rooms could talk by raising their voices, and we have of their conversation this fragment. Lacroix said, “Had I ever dreamt of this I could have forestalled it.” And Danton’s reply, with just that point of fatalism which had forbidden him to be ambitious, answered, “I knew it;” he had known it all that night.