In this great daily crowd Danton was a prominent but not a principal figure; undoubtedly (though we cannot prove it by any record) he had begun to speak in his district, and we may presume that his voice had been heard in the Palais Royal before July; for just after the fall of the Bastille his name is mentioned familiarly. But even had he desired to identify himself with the place, which is doubtful, his profession would not have permitted it. He was not briefless, unmarried, and free, like Desmoulins, but a man of three years’ standing in the highest branch of his profession; doubtless, however, he was present daily when the crowd was thickest—I mean on the holidays and during the summer evenings. All this pamphleteering, discussion, violence, salonising, oratory, and anxious criticism, even the mob violence which hunger and bad laws had inflamed, found a head in the three famous days that followed July 12, 1789. All the world knows the story, and even were it unfamiliar it would be impossible to treat of it at any length in this book, for Danton’s name hardly touches it, and our only interest here, in connection with his life, is to discover if he took part in the street fighting; for the event itself, one of the most decisive in history, a few words must suffice. Paris, and especially the Palais Royal, had been watching the struggle at Versailles with gathering anger. There, twelve miles off, every purpose for which the Parliament had met, and every good thing which the elections had seemed to ensure, lay in jeopardy. Step after step the Commons had in fact, though not in their phrases, been beaten, and the promises of six months before seemed in danger, not through any known or calculable enemy, but from the sudden appearance of an opposition which the nation, and especially Paris, had ignored. The King had retreated from his position of the last December, and the privileged orders were sympathising with a growing reaction. How far all this was due to the unconstitutional and unprecedented action of the Commons in insisting on a General Assembly cannot be discussed here. Suffice it to say that, in the opinion of the nation, the new departure of the Commons was in thorough accordance with the spirit, if not with the letter, of the recent decrees; the King was held to have broken his word, and the privileged orders to have abandoned their declarations in the face of facts. The symbol, though a poor one, of the constitutional position was the personality of Necker. Conceited, foreign, and common-place, the father of an authoress whom neither Napoleon nor posterity could tolerate, Genevese and bourgeois to the backbone, this mass of impotence yet stood, by one of the ironies of history, in the place of an idol. He, the banker, was the imagined champion for the moment of that other man from Geneva, who had died of persecution ten years before, the tender-eyed, wandering, unfortunate Rousseau, between whom and him was