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246 Such was our interview with Robespierre. I cannot call it a conversation, for his lips never parted; tightly closed as they were, he pursed them even tighter; from them, I noticed, oozed a bilious froth boding no good. I had seen all I wanted, for I had had a view of what has since been most accurately described as the tiger-cat."

It would be a waste of the time of the reader to dwell on the points in this narrative which are intensely interesting. The simplicity and even squalor of the surroundings of the mighty master of life and death, his sinister looks, his appalling silence—all these things the most hurried reader can find for himself in the passage. Its sense of reality and of life is overwhelming.

dwell on the passages in which Barras describes the closing conflicts between Robespierre and the other Revolutionaries, but there is not a line in this portion of the Memoirs which is not intensely vivid; the more so for the reason I have already given—that the narrative has the matter-of-fact unpretentiousness of daily life.

Take as an example this scene, which occurred just a few days before Danton's execution:

"As I was leaving the Convention one day in the company of Danton, Courtois, Fréron, and