Bertrand de Molleville’s accusation is of particular value to any one who is concerned, as I am, in attempting to get to the truth in this matter. It is the only one which is perfectly categorical and detailed. In proportion as it is categorical and detailed it is untrue. If you wish to know whether a man has committed a certain crime, and you hear a number of witnesses against him, one of whom only gives careful evidence with dates, details, and so forth, and if you can then prove that this witness has lied upon all the points which supported his principal accusation, you are in a fair way to winning your case. De Molleville begins by making the sum 500,000 francs. It seems enormous. It is a sum which no man could receive and spend in a few days’ debauch without attracting the attention of the whole city, which no man could invest without leaving some obvious accession of property, and he puts the receipt of this sum as coming under Montmorin’s ministry—that is, at a time when public order was secured, when the course of the registries, the transmission of property and so forth, were in the fullest light. He gives the name of the man who handed him the sum, and calls him Durand. On this point it is impossible to say yes or no, but we can say with absolute certitude that the incident of the letter upon which Bertrand de Molleville makes the whole matter turn, is an untruth added to an untruth. In the first place, he makes Danton “violent in his demands against the king.” This accusation is absolutely false. When the trial of the king was mooted, Danton did speak (notably on the 6th of September), with some decision in favour of the king’s being brought to trial upon particular points. He expressed himself in that speech with very great energy upon this particular feature of the trial, that the king merited condemnation because he had obviously and openly betrayed the nation,—a thing which nobody doubted, which nobody denied, and which Louis himself and his advisers would simply have met by saying (at a later epoch of course), “We called in the foreigner as a necessary police in the time of anarchy; we desired to save France by its betrayal.” So far, however, from Danton being a leader of the attack on Louis or of the demand for his trial, that attack and that demand were as spontaneous as anything the Convention ever did; and Danton followed rather than led, as a glance at the _Moniteur_ can prove. In the much more important debates wherein the life of Louis was first implicitly and then explicitly at stake, Danton was absent, and in the days of November there is no question at all but that Danton’s one preoccupation was to reconcile the Mountain with the Girondins.