But with the mention of that frozen place there comes a thought older than all our theories—the mourning for the dead. Danton helped to make us, and was killed: his effort has succeeded, but the tragedy remains. The army at whose source he stood, the captain who inherited his action, were worn out in forging a new world. And I will end this book by that last duty of mourning, as we who hold to immortality yet break our hearts for the dead. There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him move along their snows through the long mysterious twilights of the northern autumn in silence, with the head bent and the reins in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon. After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was as though the cannon-smoke of Waterloo, borne on the light west wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the year over the endless plains. But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the Guard and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords. APPENDIX I NOTE ON THE CORDELIERS The spot once occupied by the Cordeliers is among the most interesting in Paris, and it is of some importance to sketch its history and to reconstruct its appearance at greater length than was possible in the text. All the land from St. Germains des Près up northwards along the hillside had belonged to that abbey since its foundation, when the first dynasty of Frankish kings had endowed the foundation with a great estate carved out of what had once been the Roman fiscal lands on the south bank. Round the abbey itself a few houses had gathered, forming the “Faubourg” (or suburb) of “St. Germains”; but the greater part of the estate was open field and meadow. When Philip Augustus built his great wall round Paris it cut through the estate, leaving the Church and Abbey of St. Germains outside the city, but enclosing a small part of the fields within its boundary.