At this point Robespierre realised that he must either cajole or conquer them. For if they were curbed and reduced to silence, he would have all power absolutely in his own hands. The hour was approaching. It was necessary to strike a decisive blow, and he thought to have found the means to do so, and to overawe the Committee, at his Festival of the Supreme Being, which would take place in a couple of days, when he would speak to the assembled multitude, and dominate his colleagues in his quality of President of the Convention, a post he had sought in order to have an opportunity to assert himself at this lay ceremony, this parody of the religious celebrations of the old regime. His intention was to confirm in public, amid the acclamations of the populace, the religion of a new God, whose existence he had just proclaimed--the God of Nature, a stranger to Christianity, borrowed entire from Rousseau's famous pages in _le Vicaire Savoyard_. Robespierre's sectarian temperament experienced a deeper satisfaction than he had perhaps ever felt, at the thought that he was to declaim, among flowers and incense, those empty, sonorous phrases which he was writing on the little walnut table where his master had found some of his most burning inspirations. He became in his own eyes the high priest of the Republic, offering incense on the altar of his own superhuman sovereignty. Yes, Robespierre could already hear the enthusiastic applause of the multitude! Who would dare to stand in his way after such public consecration in the immense Place de la Révolution, where for a week past the platform was being prepared. Such was the man shadowed by Destiny, the further course of whose chequered career, with its startling incidents, we are now to follow. Robespierre had just finished his first discourse, for he was to deliver two. He closed it with a menace. "People," it ran, "let us under the auspices of the Supreme Being give ourselves up to a pure joy. To-morrow we shall again take arms against vice and tyrants!" This was his note of warning to those who, he felt, ranged themselves against him. Completely satisfied with himself, he read and re-read his sentences, stopping to polish periods and phrases, or seeking graceful and sonorous epithets. One passage especially pleased him, for a breath of _le Vicaire Savoyard_ seemed to pervade it. He spoke of the presence of the Supreme Being, in all the joys of life. "It is He," he said, "who adds a charm to the brow of beauty by adorning it with modesty; it is He who fills the maternal heart with tenderness and joy; it is He who floods with happy tears the eyes of a son clasped in his mother's arms." Robespierre smiled at the music of the phrasing which in his pedantry he thought his master would not have disowned.