With Lafayette, again, we have that half-truth and half-lie which runs through all his accusations. “The receipt for 100,000 francs was in the hands of Montmorin.” This was true. The sum was not quite 100,000, it was 61,000 (Appendix VI.); but the receipt did exist, and to any one who did not know that all the men occupying positions on the Council had been reimbursed, it might look like a receipt for a bribe, or might be twisted into meaning such. It is impossible for us to discover whether Lafayette meant to tell an untruth, as we can prove De Molleville did; he may in this matter have been perfectly loyal, for there was a note found among his papers after his death (Memoirs, iii. 84-85), saying that “a position on the Councils was only worth 10,000, and had been reimbursed at 100,000 as a bribe.” We now know from the discovery of so many receipts that from 60,000 to 80,000 was the regular price of reimbursements, but Lafayette might easily have been ignorant of this, and have jumped to a false conclusion. As to his mention of Madame Elizabeth’s having told the man who told him that Danton had been paid before the 10th August, the old man’s memory is certainly turning to the remark which many witnesses heard from the lips of that saintly woman just before the attack on the Tuilleries, when she said with simplicity (she knew nothing at all of the characters of the Revolution save what she might hear from the courtiers), “Well, we can count on Danton; he has been paid.” That is not evidence. If Danton was paid to make the 10th of August turn in favour of the monarchy, and if, as Lafayette hints, he had attempted to make it so turn, he certainly took the most extraordinary way of defending his employers. One might as well say that Lord Chatham’s principal object in the taking of Quebec was the defence of the French power in Canada. For the 10th of August was openly and directly an attack upon the ancient crown of France, to overthrow it and to substitute in its place a new regime, and Danton worked at it as indefatigably as a general before a battle would work. The remark, “General, I am more monarchist than you,” reads to me like truth; it is exactly what Danton would have said. He despised Lafayette as much as any one man can despise another. He believed right up to the moment of the war that the existing fact of the monarchy was worth all the theories in the world as a nucleus for the new regime, and he saw the emptiness of Lafayette’s vanity. He may quite probably have met it upon some occasion as direct as that which Lafayette has given us, and Lafayette, in the abundance of his folly, may quite easily have misunderstood the meaning of his criticism. Brissot is an admirable example of how the false rumours arose. He says: “I have myself seen the receipts which Montmorin held from Danton.”