Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/269

Rh Danton's primary murderer! . . . Fouquier bowed humbly, and said to the Clerk of the Court and the escort of gendarmes, 'To the Place de la Révolution!' In less than two hours, the clerk, the ushers, the gendarmes, with Fouquier-Tinville still at their head, arrived at the Committee of Public Safety, and all, speaking almost together and with combative eagerness, gave me an account of the execution as of a triumph thoroughly accomplished. The terrible Robespierre was at last launched into the eternal night, and slept side by side with Louis XVI. . . . The spectators, impatient of and, it may truly be said, hungering for the death of Robespierre, had not allowed the sigh of deliverance to escape their bodies until after they had convinced themselves of the consummation"of the execution by the unquestionable evidence of the head severed from the trunk and rolling into the basket of the executioner. Well, then, even after the execution there seemed to reign an almost general kind of fear of the possible resurrection of the implacable man whose inexorable speeches and sentences, without appeal,had so cruelly tortured human minds. The newspapers were uncertain whether they should venture to publish even the fact. The Monteur, already more than official (for it has always belonged to the victorious side), especially shrank from this its primary duty; it was only twenty-six days later, i.e. on the 6th Fructidor following, that this