He seems to have just felt two doubts disturbing the serenity of his fanatical complacency. First, whether after all he was going down to posterity as he saw himself to be—the maker of a new France, “the terror of oppressors and the refuge of the oppressed.” (One day his eyes filled when the noise of the tumbrils reached him, and he said, “I shall be remembered only as a slayer of men.” So wrapped up in himself, he had not yet heard an echo of what all men were saying.) Secondly, he wondered whether his perfect state was so near as he had thought. The killing went on, and he got no nearer. The “anti-patriots,” the “anti-revolutionaries,” the “anti-Robespierres” (though he did not think of them so) passed perpetually eastward and westward daily from the prisons to the two guillotines. By the irony of whatever rules and laughs at men, events caused the first mutterings to rise among the Extremists. The Terror was too mild, and above all the men with hearts of beasts—the remainder of the Hébertists—hated a policy which included, however fantastically, the ideal and the worship of God. They hated his half-alliance with whatever was Christian in the Convention, and his perpetual appeals to the Moderates. The Lower Committee had a partially independent life. It was known to be the policy of Robespierre to submit this body, as he had submitted all the other organs of government, to the great Committee of Public Safety. Hence it was in this Lower Committee of General Security—menaced as a function and as individuals, thoroughly in touch, by its position, with the police—that the conspiracy arose. The majority of its members joined it, and from the Higher Committee Billaud and Collot adhered. On the 7th of Thermidor (25th of July 1794) the storm burst. Barrère read his report to the Convention, and it was an open menace to Robespierre. The origins of that report merit a certain discussion. We have seen that from the first the reports, directed by the Committee, were usually written by Barrère, and were read to the Convention by him. On the other hand, we can discover usually in the style, and always in the opinions of the reports, the action of whoever led in the councils of the Committee. Thus, in the document of this nature of which so much mention is made in chapter vi., the spirit, and evidently many of the actual phrases, are the work of Danton. Who drew up Barrère’s report, whether (possibly) it was his own work, when he saw opinion shifting away from Robespierre, or whether, as is more probable, it was inspired by Billaud and Collot, and permitted by the five neutrals, we cannot tell. The main fact is this, that the Committee had at least permitted to be made in its name a public declaration hostile to the man who, through the Committee, had ruled France.