One acquittal is remembered beyond all the rest. In every school and in every nursery of France the story continues to be told how Sombreuil, the governor of the Invalides, was acquitted by the judges, but would have been butchered by the mob outside if his daughter had not drunk to the nation in a glass filled with the warm blood of the last victim. They were taken home in triumph. Sombreuil perished in the Reign of Terror. His daughter married, and died at Avignon in 1823, at the height of the royalist reaction. The fame of that heroic moment in her life filled the land, and her heart was brought to Paris, to be laid in the consecrated ground where she had worshipped as a child, and it rests under the same gilded canopy that covers the remains of Napoleon. Many people believe that this is one of the legends of royalism which should be strung with the mock pearls of history. No contemporary mentions it, and it does not appear before 1801. Mlle. de Sombreuil obtained a pension from the Convention, but this was not included in the statement of her claims. An Englishman, who witnessed the release of Sombreuil, only relates that father and daughter were carried away swooning from the strain of emotion. I would not dwell on so well-worn an anecdote if I believed that it was false. The difficulty of disbelief is that the son of the heroine wrote a letter affirming it, in which he states that his mother was never afterwards able to touch a glass of red wine. The point to bear in mind is that these atrocious criminals rejoiced as much in a man to save as in a man to kill. They were servants of a cause, acting under authority. Robespierre, among the chiefs, seems to have aimed mainly at the destruction of the priests. Others proposed that the prisoners should be confined underground, and that water should be let in until they were drowned. Marat advised that the prisons should be burnt, with their inmates. "The 2nd of September," said Collot d'Herbois, "is the first article of the creed of Liberty. Without it there would be no National Convention." "France," said Danton, in a memorable conversation, "is not republican. We can only establish a Republic by the intimidation of its enemies." They had crushed the Legislature, they had given warning to the Germans that they would not save the king by advancing on the capital when it was in the hands of men capable of such deeds, and they had secured a Jacobin triumph at the Paris election. Marat prepared an address exhorting the departments to imitate their example, and it was sent out under cover from the Ministry of Justice. Danton himself sent out the same orders. Only one copy seems to have been preserved, and it might have been difficult to determine the responsibility of Danton, if he had not avowed to Louis Philippe that he was the author of the massacres of September.