are "shut off by high tapestries, prostitutes with shrill voices" pursue their avocation.[3222]--To descend to this low level so barefacedly, to fraternise with barrier sots, and wenches, to endure their embraces and hiccoughs, is bad enough, even for docile deputies. More than one half of them loathed it beforehand and remained at home; after this they do not feel disposed to attend the Convention.[3223]--But the "Mountain sends for them, and an officer brings them back;" it is necessary that they should co-operate through their presence and felicitations in the profanations and apostasies which follow;[3224] it is necessary that they should approve of and decree that which they hold in horror, not alone folly and nonsense, but crime, the murder of innocent people, and that of their friends.--All this is done. "Unanimously, and with the loudest applause," the Left, united with the Right, sends Danton to the scaffold, its natural chieftain, the great promoter and leader of the Revolution.[3225] "Unanimously, and with the loudest applause," the Right, united with the Left, votes the worse decrees of the Revolutionary government.[3226] "Unanimously," with approving and enthusiastic cheers, manifesting the warmest sympathy for Collot d'Herbois, Couthon, and Robespierre,[3227] the Convention, through multiplied and spontaneous re-elections, maintains the homicidal government which the Plain detests, because it is homicidal, and which the Mountain detests, because it is decimated by it. Plain and Mountain, by virtue of terror, majority after majority, end in consenting to and bringing about their own suicide: on the 22nd of Prairial, the entire Convention has stretched out its neck;[3228] on the 8th of Thermidor, for a quarter of an hour after Robespierre's speech,[3229] it has again stretched this out, and would probably have succumbed, had not five or six of them, whom Robespierre designated or named, Bourdon de l'Oise, Vadier, Cambon, Billaud and Panis, stimulated by the animal instinct of self-preservation, raised their arms to ward off the knife. Nothing but imminent, personal, mortal danger could, in these prostrated beings, supplant long-continued fear with still greater fear. Later on, Siéyès, on being asked how he acted in these times, replied, "I lived." In effect, he and others are reduced to that; they succeeded in doing this, at all costs, and at what a price![3230] His secret notes, his most private sketches confirm this[3231]...