The only reason she gives is the physical repugnance that Danton inspired in her. She confessed that no one could have shown more zeal, a greater love of liberty, a livelier desire to come to an understanding for the sake of the public cause, than he. Certainly she had based her judgments thus far in the Revolution on such indications, but Danton was of a different nature from the men who surrounded her. A volcanic animal tremendous in passions as in energy, in intellect, in influence. She says that never did a face seem to her to show brutal passion so perfectly. Her imagination had been awakened. All her life she had been the plaything of this imagination, and every face that came under her eyes had been read, its owner’s character analyzed and his rôle in life assigned. Danton she figured poniard in hand, exciting by voice and gesture a troup of assassins more timid or less bloodthirsty than he. She could not conquer the effect of this vision and for this reason she refused his proffer of reconciliation. Had Danton offended her by some coarse familiarity? The best reason for rejecting this explanation of her dislike is that she says nothing about it. If an unwarranted gallantry had ever occurred, we may be positive that she would not have kept it to herself. The “confessions” of her Memoirs make such an interpretation impossible; even her friend Lanthenas was not spared on this score. It is impossible to suppose that Danton would have been. For the first time, Madame Roland found herself face to face with a man who was an embodiment of the insurrectionary spirit. Hitherto that spirit had been an ideal, a theory, an unseen but powerful force which was necessary to accomplish what she wanted. Personally she had never come in contact with it. She had idealized it as an avenging spirit, “terrible but glorious,” cruel but just, awful but divine. That this force had an end to reach, a personal ambition to satisfy, an ideal to attain, that it might come into conflict with her, she had not calculated. In her plan it was simply an avenging fire which she could use, and which, when she had had enough of it, she could snuff out. But now she saw an insurrection as a bald fact. Danton was a positive, living incarnation of her doctrine. Instead of rhapsodizing over the “divine right of insurrection,” he organized the slums into brigades; instead of talking about Utopia, he gave the populace pikes and showed them how to use them. His policy was one of action. It was a fearful bloody policy, but it was definite and practical, and a logical result of what Madame Roland had been preaching.