While it was still just light, between eight and nine in the evening, Robespierre, whom the keepers of the Luxemburg prison had refused, was brought to the Mairie, and there one after the other all the arrested deputies came, profiting by the official routine; for the Mairie was the “right place” officially for prisoners when a difficulty arose as to imprisonment within Paris. But official routine had a strange bedfellow that night, for while the officials took the prisoners there, the small band of rebels, who knew of no place more friendly, brought there also those whom they had delivered by force. Robespierre was again with the strongest of his friends—his brother, St. Just, Couthon; he was surrounded by an organised and legal body, the Commune, which had risen in his defence; they passed to the Hotel de Ville, and outside, on the Place de Grève, there gathered between ten o’clock and eleven a fairly large group of the National Guard. But there was no order among them, nor any accurate knowledge among their officers as to what was to be done. From the windows of the room where Robespierre and his companions sat, there could be dimly seen a moving crowd of mingled citizens and guards, discussing rather than preparing for action. Robespierre refused to put himself at the head of the movement; at least it is only thus that we can explain the delay and the confusion. He was to the last the strange mixture of lawyer and pedant and idealist. He would not act without the legal right, for his pedantry forbade it, nor move with an armed minority, because, judged by his theories, it would have been a crime. Perhaps at the very last he decided to move: there exists a document authorising a march on the Convention, and at its base the first three letters of his name—the signature unfinished, interrupted. Meanwhile the Convention had found a new energy and a power of corporate action to which it had been long a stranger—each man there was defending his life. Legendre, with a small force, went and closed the Jacobins. Barras was given the command of such armed men as could be gathered; the two committees sent emissaries who appealed with success to the Sections. The Convention was the law which had always meant so much to the people; it was the authority of the constitution. Its majority, obeyed when it was in lethargy, could not but be successful when it awoke. All Paris defended it. At midnight one of the sudden thunder-showers which are common in the Seine valley at that season cleared what was left of the crowd before the Hotel de Ville. They had discussed both sides, and they had not decided—hardly an army for rebellion; they had doubted what business they had there, and with the rain they went home. Yet it was not till two hours after, in the early morning, that the little band of the Convention came into the square. They found it almost empty, with here and there a small group standing on the wet cobble-stones, sleepy but curious.