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Rh of a tutor to the Dauphin, removal of the Royal Family to the Luxembourg, were the first measures adopted by the Assembly. But its orders were countermanded, and the Royal Family taken to the dungeon-like tower of the Temple instead of to the palace assigned them; while the Swiss troops—who had incurred the deadly hatred of the populace of Paris by firing on and killing them by thousands, in their defence of the Tuileries—were imprisoned in the Abbaye, the most exposed of the prisons. For a new power had mysteriously sprung into existence on that night of the 10th of August—the insurrectionary Commune. Whence its authority—by whom elected—none could say; but, by the occult law of revolutions, the leadership suddenly passed from the Assembly into its hands. One man at that moment was the soul of the Commune, the man who, if any one, had made the 10th of August: the man who could suffer thousands to be massacred, yet weep like a woman over the death of one he loved: the man who summed up his political practice in that famous my, "We must dare, and again dare, and without end dare!" To name Danton is not so much to speak of a single man as of a whole section of the people. He was great because he represented such a vast mass of the national life; but his greatness was disfigured because this national life itself was turbid and corrupt. If Robespierre might be called the abstract idea of the Revolution, its will was Danton, just as Marat seems to have been its avenging demon.

No man of the Revolution inspired Madame Roland with such instinctive antipathy as Danton. Robespierre she admired, before their common party had split into the hostile camps of Gironde and Mountain; Marat,