Remove the scene by hundreds of years, and tell it of a primitive people in some mountain valley, it assumes a simplicity and a grandeur as legend. Their old traditions (let us say) have been lost or stolen from them. They are casting about for a lawgiver and for a starting-point. A pure idealist is found, draconian in his method, but ascetic and sincere in his life, laying down as necessary for the state a clear and simple morality, basing all ethics on the recognition and the worship of God. If we make that picture we have some idea of what passed through the mind of the little clique which still surrounded Robespierre, some conception of the picture which still half-fascinated the crowd. For Robespierre himself it was intensely true; he lived æons and myriads of leagues away in time and space from humanity, intent upon his dream. But in sight of the mummery stood Notre Dame. Not a man there but had been baptized in the Christian faith; a history more complex and more eventful than that of perhaps any other nation was the inheritance and the future of that crowd. And even as the game was being played, the real France on the Sambre and in the plains of Valenciennes was carrying out the oldest of struggles in defence of the first of rights. The scene has been laughed at and despised sufficiently by aliens within and without the French nation; let it suffice for this book to insist upon its unreality, and to assert that its principal actor was genuine because he lived in the unreal. The law of the 22nd of Prairial followed this feast. It was the establishment of a pure despotism, arbitrary, absolute, personal. Already the trials were centralised in Paris since the demand of St. Just had been made. The Commune had been captured, the popular commissions used, even the Presidency of the Convention had become the appanage of one man and his associates. This new law proposed the final step. After it was passed the trials were to be conducted without proofs, and without witness or pleading, for they were to be nothing more than a formal process. The Committee once satisfied of guilt, the tribunal was merely to condemn. To be upon the lists was virtually to be dead. It was the end of civil government, the declaration of a state of siege. And that at the moment when the armies sent every day better and better news. The Convention debated with Robespierre in the chair; it hesitated and it nearly condemned the proposal. There was a conflict in the minds of some between the admiration—almost the adoration—of a man; in the minds of others, between fear and the necessity apparent to all of relaxing the machinery which only the national danger had called into being.