On June 15 a high official in the administration of the department was at Maubeuge, on a visit to Lafayette. His name was Roederer, and we shall meet him again. He rose high under Napoleon, and is one of those to whom we owe our knowledge of the Emperor's character, as well as of the events I am about to relate. His interview with the general was interrupted by a message from Paris. Lafayette was called away; and Roederer, from the next room, heard the joyful exclamations of the officers. The news was the fall of the Girondin ministry; and Lafayette, to strengthen the king's hands, wrote to the Assembly remonstrating against the illiberal and unconstitutional tendencies of the hour. His letter was read on the 18th. A new ministry had been forming, consisting of Feuillants and men friendly to Lafayette, one of whom, Terrier de Montciel, enjoyed the confidence of the king. On the opposition side were the Girondins angry and alarmed at their fall from power, the more uncompromising Jacobins, Petion at the head of the Commune, and behind Petion, the real master of Paris, Danton, surrounded by a group of his partisans, Panis and Sergent in the police, Desmoulins and Freron in the press, leaders of the populace, such as Santerre and Legendre, and above them all, the Alsatian soldier, Westermann. With Danton and his following we reach the lowest stage of what can still be called the conflict of opinion, and come to bare cupidity and vengeance, to brutal instinct and hideous passion. All these elements were very near the surface in former phases of the Revolution. At this point they are about to prevail, and the man of action puts himself forward in the place of contending theorists. Robespierre and Brissot were politicians who did not shrink from crime, but it was in the service of some form of the democratic system. Even Marat, the most ghastly of them all, who demanded not only slaughter but torture, and whose ferocity was revolting and grotesque, even Marat was obedient to a logic of his own. He adopted simply the state of nature and the primitive contract, in which thousands of his contemporaries believed. The poor had agreed to renounce the rights of savage life and the prerogative of force, in return for the benefits of civilisation; but finding the compact broken on the other side, finding that the upper classes governed in their own interest, and left them to misery and ignorance, they resumed the conditions of barbaric existence before society, and were free to take what they required, and to inflict what punishment they chose upon men who had made a profit of their sufferings. Danton was only a strong man, who wished for a strong government in the interest of the people, and in his own. In point of doctrine, he cared for little but the relief of the poor by taxing the rich. He had no sympathy with the party that was gathering in the background, whose aim it was not only to reduce inequalities, but to