But there is another side. In much that he said in prison, in all that he said on his way to the scaffold, he is simply speaking to Death and defying him. The inmost thing in a man, the stock of the race, appears without restraint; he becomes the Gaul. That most un-northern habit of defiance, especially of defiance to the inevitable and to the strongest, the custom of his race and their salvation, grows on his lips. He insults Death, he jests; his language, never chaste or self-conscious, takes on the laughter of the Rabelaisian, and (true Rabelaisian again) he wraps up in half-a-dozen words the whole of a situation. Thus we see him leaning against the window of his prison and calling to Westermann in the next cell, “Oh! if I could leave my legs to Couthon[147] and my virility to Robespierre, things might still go on.” And again when Lacroix said, “I will cut my own hair at the neck, so that Sanson the executioner shall not meddle with it,” Danton replied, “Yet will Sanson intermeddle with the vertebræ of your neck.” So he meets death with a broad torrent of words; and that a civilisation accustomed rather to reticence should know what this meant in him, my readers must note his powerful asides to Desmoulins and to Hérault, coinciding with the fearful pun in which he tried to raise the drooping courage of D’Eglantine. Also in his prison this direct growth of the soil of France “talked often of the fields and of rivers.” Shakespeare should have given us the death scenes of so much energy, defiance, coarseness, affection, and great courage. In the Conciergerie they spent the rest of the day waiting for the trial, and this time Danton was next to Westermann, to whom and to Desmoulins he said, “We must say nothing save before the Committees or at the trial.” It was his plan to move the people by a public defence, but his enemies in power had formed a counter-plan, and, as we shall see, forestalled him. Desmoulins, “the flower that grew on Danton,” was still bewildered. So he remained to the end; at the foot of the scaffold he could not understand. “If I could only have written a No. VII. I would have turned the tables.”[148] “It is a duel of Commodus; they have the lance and I have not even a reed.” To that man, his equal in years,[149] but a boy compared with him in spirit, Danton had always shown, and now continued to show, a peculiar affection. He treated him like a younger brother, and never made him suffer those violent truths with which all France and most of his friends were familiar in his mouth. So now, and in the trial, and on the way to the scaffold, his one attempt was to calm the bitter violence and outburst of Camille. There are two phrases of Danton’s which have been noted on this first day passed at the Conciergerie, and which cannot be omitted, though in form they have not his diction, yet in spirit they might be his; they are recollections presumably of something of greater length called to Westermann.