His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction of the national energies, and must merge with their main current at an imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who deliberately plan success that they will not leave themselves amenable to such influences, and it is the most frequent cause of their failure. Thus such men as arrive at great heights of power are most often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and original, but, at the same time, yielding unconsciously to an environment with which they sympathise, or to which they were born. It is not difficult to determine the accidents of action, temperament, and locality which predispose to success in one’s own society. It is less easy to appreciate what corresponds to them under foreign conditions. It was seen in the first chapter that Paris sums up in herself those conditions in the case of the French nation; and it was seen also (a point of peculiar importance) that Paris at the close of the eighteenth century was ill at ease—out of herself, demanding her place and yet anxious as to the means by which it might be attained. It might be imagined that this was a kind of usurpation. Such a belief is entertained by most foreigners, and certainly it has not been lacking among the more idealist of the French Republicans. Nevertheless, such a view is erroneous, and the Girondists, for all their virtues, went (as we shall discover) against the nature of things when they would have made of Paris but one of the cities, or rather but “an aliquot voting part” of the nation. The demand of Paris was essentially reasonable, and had to be satisfied. Why? Because without her leadership not this thing or that thing would have been done, but nothing would have been done. The crowds who waited round the coaching inns in the country towns for news of the city in the great early days of ’89, by their very attitude asked and expected Paris to move. Paris, then, is Danton’s gate. It is up the flood of the Parisian tide that he floats. That tide rises much higher than even he had thought possible, and it throws him at last on the high inaccessible place of the 10th of August. Once there, from a pinnacle he sees all France. Just as Cromwell was the Puritan soldier till he reached power, and then became, or desired to become, the representative of England, so Danton is the Parisian Frondeur till from a place of responsibility and direction he aims partly at the realisation of French ideas, but mainly at the integrity and salvation of France itself.