As to the first, it is a very minor point in the general history of the Revolution, but it is of considerable influence upon the career of Danton himself. When the affair of Marat was (or should have been) forgotten, the Châtelet, with that negligence which we have seen them display in the business of the warrant for Marat’s arrest, saw fit to launch another warrant, this time for the arrest of Danton himself. Once more that unpopular and moribund tribunal put itself on the wrong side of the law, and once more it chose the most inopportune moment for its action. It was on the 17th of March,[72] nearly two months after the affair—two months during which Danton had been hard at work effacing its effects upon his reputation—that the warrant was issued, and the motive of arrest given in the parchment was of the least justifiable kind. In the district meeting of the day, when the police officers had been taken to the hall of the Cordeliers, and had had the changes in the law read out to them, Danton had made use of a violent phrase: its actual words were not known; some said that he had threatened to “call out the Faubourg St. Antoine, and make the jaws of the guard grow white.” Other witnesses refused to attribute those words to him, but accused him of saying, “If every one thought as I do, we should have twenty thousand men at our back;” his friends admitted that some angry and injudicious speech, such as he was often guilty of, had escaped him, but they affirmed that he had added, “God forbid that such a thing should happen; the cause is too good to be so jeopardised.”