The heads of the statues were crowned alternately with wreaths of oak and laurel.

  A green drapery, painted with similar crowns in a darker shade of green, fell in deep, straight folds from the cornice of the periphery, and entirely covered the wall of the lower part of the hall occupied by the assembly. Above this drapery, the wall was white and cold. In this wall, as if hollowed out with a punch, with neither moulding nor foliage were two rows of public tribunes, square at the base and round at the top; according to the rule, for Vitruvius was not dethroned; the archivaults were superimposed on the architraves. There were ten tribunes on each of the long sides of the hall, and at each of the two ends two huge boxes; in all, twenty-four. Into these the multitudes flocked.

  The spectators in the lower row of tribunes overflowed on all the gunnels, and formed in groups on all the reliefs of the architecture. A long iron car, securely fastened breast high, served as a railing for the upper tribunes and protected the spectators from the crowding of the throngs coming up the staircase. Once, however, a man was pushed over into the assembly; he fell a little on Massieu, bishop of Beauvais, and so was not killed, and said: "Well! so a bishop is really good for something!"

  The hall of the Convention could hold two thousand people: on days of insurrection, three thousand.

  The convention had two sessions, one in the daytime, one in the evening.

  The back of the president's chair was round, decorated with gilt nails. His table rested on four winged monsters with a single foot, that seemed to have come out of the Apocalypse to be present at the Revolution. They looked as if they had been taken out of Ezekiel's chariot to draw Samson's tumbrel.

  On the president's table there was a great bell, almost as large as a church bell, a large copper inkstand, and a folio volume bound in parchment, which contained the official reports.

  Decapitated heads, borne on the end of a pike, dripped blood on this table.

  The tribune was reached by means of nine steps. These steps were high, steep, and difficult to mount; Gensonné stumbled one day as he was ascending them. "They are scaffold stairs!" he said. "Serve your apprenticeship," exclaimed Carrier.

  In the corners of the hall, where the wall semed too bare, the architect had placed fasces for ornamentation, with the axe outside.

  On the right and on the left of the tribune, there were pedestals bearing two candelabra twelve feet high, each with four pairs of lamps. Each public box had similar candelabra. On the pedestals of these candelabra there were carved circles, which the people called "guillotine collars."

  The seats of the Assembly rose almost to the cornice of the tribunes; the representatives and the people could converse together.

  The exits of the tribunes opened into a labyrinth of corridors, usually filled with a furious din.

  The convention crowded the palace and overflowed into the neighboring mansions. Hôtel de Longueville and Hôtel de Coigny. Hôtel de Coigny was where the royal furniture was removed after the tenth of August, if a letter of Lord Bradford's can be believed. It took two months to dismantle the Tuileries.

  The commitee had their quarters in the vicinity of the hall; the Committees of Legislature, Agriculture, and Commerce were in the Pavilion Egalité; those of the Marine, Colonies, Finance, Assignats and Public Welfare in the Pavilion Liberté. The committee of War was in the Pavilion Unité.

  The Committee of General Safety communicated directly with the Committee of Public Welfare by means of a dark passage lighted day and night by a reflector, where the spies of every party came and went. People never spoke there.

  The bar of the Convention was several times removed. Usually, it was at the president's right hand.

  At the ends of the hall, the vertical partitions which closed the concentric semicircles of the aniphithentre, left between them and the wall two narrow, deep lobbies from which opened two dark square doors. These were means of entrance and exit.

  The representatives entered the hall directly by a door opening from the Terrace des Feuillants.

  This hall, dimly lighted in the daytime by small windows, poorly lighted in the evening with ghastly lamps, had a strange nocturnal gloom about it. This dim illumination, together with the evening shades, made the sessions by lamplight dismal. The people could not see each other; from one end of the hall to the other, from right to left, groups of indistinct faces insulted each other. People met without recognizing one another. One day as Laignelot was hurrying to the tribune he ran against some one in the inclined passage. "Beg pardon, Robespierre," he said. "Whom do you take me for?" replied a harsh voice. "Beg pardon, Marat," said Laignelot.

  Two of the lower tribunes, to the right and left of the president were reserved, for strange to say, there were privileged spectators at the Convention. These were the only tribunes having any drapery. In the centre of the architrave this drapery was caught up by two gold tassels. The tribunes for the people were bare.

  The effect of all this was intense, savage, regular. Savage correctness; this is a suggestion of the whole Revolution. The hall of the Convention offers the most complete specimen of what artists have since called "architecture Messidor"; it was massive and slender. The builders of that period took symmetry for beauty. The last word of the Renaissance had been spoken under Louis XV., and a reaction followed. The noble in art had been carried to insipidity, and purity to monotony. There is such a thing as prudery in architecture. After the dazzling orgies in form and color of the eighteenth century, art was put on a diet, and allowed nothing but the straight line. This sort of progress ended in ugliness. Art reduced to a skeleton, was the result. This was the advantage of this kind of wisdom and abstinence; the style was so sober that it became lean.

  Setting aside all political feeling, and looking at it from an architectural point of view, there was something about this hall that made one shiver. One recalled confusedly, the former theatre, the garlanded boxes, its blue and crimson ceiling, its facetted chandeliers, its girandoles, with diamond reflections, its dove-colored hangings, its profusion of cupids and nymphs on the curtains and draperies, the whole royal and erotic idyl painted, carved and gilded, which had filled this stern place with its smile, and one saw all about him these hard right angles, cold and sharp as steel; it was something like Boucher guillotined by David.

  IV.

  Whoever saw the Assembly never gave a second thought to the hall. Whoever saw the drama gave no thought to the theatre. Nothing was more deformed, nor more sublime. A pile of heroes, a herd of cowards. Wild beasts on a mountain, reptiles in a marsh. There swarmed, jostled, challenged, threatened, fought and lived, all those combatants who are to-day but phantoms.

  A gathering of Titans.

  On the right, the Gironde,—a legion of thinkers; on the left the mountain,—a group of athletes. On one side, Buissot, who received the keys of the Bastille; Barbaroux, whom the Marseilles troops obeyed; Kervélégan, who had the battalion of Brest garrisoned in the Faubourg Saint Marceau, under his hand; Gersonné, who established the supremacy of representatives over generals; the fatal Gaudet, to whom the queen showed the sleeping dauphin one night at the Tuileries, Gaudet kissed the child's forehead and caused the father to lose his head; Salles, the fanciful denouncer of the intimacies between the Mountain and Austria; Sillery, the humpback of the Right, as Couthon was the cripple of the Left. Lause-Duperret, who when called a "rascal" by a journalist, invited him to dine with him, saying: "I know that rascal means simply a man who does not think as we do"; Rabaut-Saint-Etienne, who commenced his Almanac of 1790 with these words: "The revolution is ended"; Quinette, one of those who overthrew Louis XVI.; the Jansenist Camus, who framed the evil constitution of the clergy, believed in the miracles of the deacon Pâris, and knelt down every night before a Christ seven feet high, nailed against the wall of his room; Fauchet, a priest who, with Camille Desmoulins, caused the fourteenth of July; Isnarn, who committed the crime of saying "Paris will be destroyed," at the same moment that Brunswick said: "Paris will be burned"; Jacob Dupont, the first one to exclaim "I am an Atheist," and to whom Robespierre replied: "Atheism is aristocratic"; Lanjuinais, a stern, wise, and brave Breton; Ducos, the Euryalus of Boyer-Fonfréde; Rebecqui, the pylades of Barbaroux, Rebecqui gave in his resignation because Robespierre had not been guillotined; Richaud, who fought the permanency of the Sections; Lasource, who uttered this murderous apophthegm: "Woe to thankful nations!" and who afterwards at the foot of the scaffold, was to contradict himself by hurling this proud speech at those of the Mountain: "We die because the people are asleep, and you will die because the people will awaken"; Biroteau, who had the abolition of inviolability decreed, and was thus unconsciously the forger of the chopping-knife, and erected the scaffold for himself; Charles Villatte, who shielded his conscience behind this protestation: "I do not wish to vote under the knife"; Louvet, the author of Faublas, who was to end as a bookseller in the Palais Royal with Lodoïska behind the counter; Mercier, the author of the "Tableau de Paris," who exclaimed: "Every king felt for the nape of his neck the twenty-first of January"; Marec, whose anxiety was the faction of ancient boundaries; the journalist Carra, who said to the executioner at the foot of the scaffold: "It annoys me to die. I should have liked to see what follows"; Vigée, who had the title of grenadier in the second battalion of Mayence-et-Loire, who, when threatened by the public tribunes, cried out: "I ask that at the first murmur of the public tribunes, we withdraw and march to Versailles, sword in hand!" Buzot, destined to die of hunger; Valazé, victim of his own dagger; Condorcet, who was to die at Bourg-la-Reine, changed to Bourg-Egalité, denounced by the Horace he carried in his pocket; Pétion, whose fate was to be worshipped by the multitude in 1792, and devoured by the wolves in 1794; twenty others beside, Pontécoulant, Marboz, Lidon, Saint-Martin, Dussaulx, the translator of "Juvenal," who took part in the campaign of Hanover; Boileau, Bertrand, Lesterp-Beauvais, Lesage, Gomaire, Gardien, Mainvielle, Duplantier, Lacaze, Antiboul, and at their head a Barnave called Vergniaud.

  On the other side, Antoine-Louise-Léon Florelle de Saint-Just, pale, with a low forehead, regular profile, mysterious eye, exceedingly melancholy, twenty-three years of age; Merlin de Thionville, whom the Germans called Feuer-Teufel, "fire devil"; Merlin de Douai, the guilty author of the "Law of the Suspected"; Soubrany, whom the people of Paris, on the first Prairial asked to have for a general; the former priest Lebon, holding a sword in his hand which had once scattered holy water; Billaud-Varennes, who foresaw the magistracy of the future, no judges but arbiters; Fabre d'Eglantine who made a charming discovery, the Republican calendar, just as Rouget de Lisle had a sublime inspiration, the Marseillaise, and neither were guilty of a second offence; the attorney of the Commune, who said: "A dead king is not a man less"; Grougon, who entered Tripstadt, Newstadt, and Spire, and saw the Prussian army flee; Lacroix, a lawyer turned general, made chevalier de Saint-Louis six days before the tenth of August; Fréron Thersite, son of Fréron-Zoile; Ruth the inexorable investigator of the iron press, destined for a great Republican suicide:—he was to kill himself the day the Republic died; Fouché, with the soul of a demon, and the face of a corpse; Camboulas, the friend of Father Duchesne, who said to Guillotin: "You belong to the club of the Feuillants, but your daughter belongs to the club of the Jacobins"; Jagot, who gave this savage reply to those complaining about the nakedness of the prisoner: " A prison is a garment of stone; "Javogues, the terrible spoiler of the tombs of Saint-Denis; Osselin, the proscriber, who hid in his house Madame Charry, one of the proscribed; Bentabolle, who, when he presided, made signs to the tribunes to cheer or to hoot; the journalist Robert, the husband of Mademoiselle Kéralio, who wrote: "Neither Robespierre nor Marat come to my house; Robespierre may come whenever he wishes; Marat never"; Garan-Coulon, who had proudly demanded, when Spain interposed in the trial of Louis XVI., that the Assembly should not condescend to read a letter from a king in behalf of a king; Grégoire at first a worthy bishop of the Primitive Church, but who afterwards under the Empire obliterated the Republican Grégoire with Count Grégoire; Amar, who said,—

  "The whole earth condemns Louis XVI. To whom then shall we appeal for judgment? To the planets?"

  Rouyer, who was opposed to having the cannon fired from the Pont-Neuf the twenty-first of January, saying,—

  "A king's head will not make any more noise in falling than the head of any other man;" Chénier, André's brother; Vadier, one of those who laid a pistol on the tribune; Tanis, who said to Momoro,—

  "I want Marat and Robespierre to embrace each other at my table in my house."

  "Where do you live?"

  "At Charenton."

  "I should have been surprised if it were anywhere else," said Momoro. Legendre, who was the butcher of the French Revolution, as Pride was the butcher of the Revolution of England.

  "Come, let me knock you down!" he exclaimed to Lanjuinais. And Lanjuinais replied,—

  "First let it be decreed that I am an ox." Collot d'Herbois, that melancholy comedian, wearing over his face the ancient mask with two mouths which said yes and no, approving with one what it blamed with the other, branding Carrier at Nantes and defying Châlier at Lyons, sending Robespierre to the scaffold, and Marat to the Pantheon; Génissieux who demanded the penalty of death for those who wore the medallion, " Louis XVI. martyrisé ; Léonard Bourdon, the schoolmaster, who offered his house to the old man of Mont Jura; Topsent, the sailor; Goupilleau, the lawyer; Laurent Lecointre, a merchant; Duhem, a physician; Sergent, the sculptor; David, the painter; Joseph Egalité, a prince.

  Besides these, Lecointe Puiraveau, who asked to have Marat decreed to be "in a state of lunacy;" Robert Lindet, the disquieting creator of that devil-fish, whose head was the Committee of General Safety, and which covered France with twenty-one thousand arms called the

  Revolutionary Committees; Lebœuf, about whom Girey-Dupré, in his "Christmas of False Patriots" wrote this verse,—

  "Lebœuf saw Legendre and bellowed."

  Thomas Paine, an American, and merciful; Anacharsis Cloots, a German baron, a millionaire, atheist, Hébertist, candid; the upright Lebas, friend of the Duplays; Rovére, one of those rare men who are wicked for wickedness' sake, because art for art's sake exists more than people are aware of; Charlier who wished to have the aristocrats formally addressed; Tallien, an elegist and cruel, who will cause the ninth Thermidor from love; Cambacérès, an attorney who will be prince; Carrier, an attorney who will be a tiger; Laplanche, who exclaimed one day: "I demand priority for the alarm-gun;" Thuriot, who wanted to have the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal vote by acclamation; Bourdon de I'Oise, who challenged Chambon, denounced Paine, and was denounced by Hébert; Fayau who proposed "to send an incendiary army" to la Vendée; Tavaux, who came near being a mediator between la Gironde and the Mountain; Venier, who asked to have the Girondist Chiefs and the chiefs of the Mountain serve as common soldiers; Rewbell, who shut himself up in Mayence; Bourbotte, who had his horse killed under him, at the taking of Saumur; Guimberteau, who directed the army of the coast of Cherbourg; Jard-Panvilliers, who directed the army of the coast of Rochelle; Lecarpentier, who directed the squadron of Cancale; Roberjot, for whom the ambush of Rastad was waiting; Prieur de la Marne, who in camp wore his old counter-epaulet of major; Levasseurde la Sarthe, who with a word decided Surrent, commandant of the battalion of Saint-Amand, to commit suicide; Reverchon, Maure, Bernard de Saintes, Charles Richard, Lequinio, and at the head of this group a Mirabeau called Danton.

  Outside these two camps, and respected by both, rose a single man, Robespierre.

  V.

  Below crouched Terror, which can be noble, and Fear which is base. Beneath passion, beneath heroism, beneath devotion, beneath rage, was the melancholy crowd of the anonymous. The dregs of the Assembly were called la Plaine. It contained everything drifting; men who doubted, who hesitated, who recoiled, who procrastinated, those who were spies, each fearing somebody. The Mountain was the elite; la Plaine was the common crowd. La Plaine was summed up and condensed in Sieyés.

  Sieyés was a deep man who had grown shallow. He had stopped at the Third-Estate and had never been able to rise to the height of the people. Certain minds are so constituted that they never pass beyond mediocrity. Sieyés called Robespierre a tiger, and he called Sieyés a mole. This metaphysician had arrived not at wisdom, but at prudence. He was the courtier, not the servitor of the Revolution. He took a shovel and went to work with the people in the Champ-de-Mars, harnessed to the same wagon with Alexandre de Beauharnais. He advised energy, but never made use of it. He said to the Girondists: "Put the cannon on your side." There are thinkers who are fighters, such as Condorcet with Vergniaud, or Camille Desmoulins with Danton. There are thinkers who are anxious to live; such were with Sieyés.

  The most generous vats have their dregs. Below even the Plaine there was the Marais. Hideous stagnation disclosing the transparencies of egotism. There the fearful trembled in dumb expectation. The infamous without shame; latent anger; revolt under servitude. They were cynically frightened; they had all the courage of cowardice; they preferred la Gironde and chose the Mountain; the final result depended on them; they poured out on the successful side; they delivered Louis XVI. to Vergniaud, Vergniaud to Danton, Danton to Robespierre, Robespierre to Tallien. They pilloried Marat while he was alive, and deified Marat after he was dead. They upheld everything till the day when they overthrew everything. Their instinct was to give a decisive push to everything that tottered. In their eyes, as they had been brought into service on condition that there should be solidity, to waver was to betray them. They were numbers, they were force, they were fear. Hence the daring of baseness.

  They were the cause of May 31st, the eleventh Germinal, the ninth Thermidor; tragedies knotted by giants and untied by dwarfs.

  VI.

  With these men full of passion, were mingled men full of dreams. The Utopia was there in all its forms; in its warlike form, which admitted the scaffold, and in its innocent form which abolished capital punishment; a spectre when facing thrones, an angel when facing the people. Opposed to the fighting minds were the brooding minds. The first had war in their heads; the others, peace; one brain, Carnot, gave birth to fourteen armies; another brain, Jean Derby, meditated an universal democratic confederation. In the midst of this furious eloquence, among these voices howling and raging, there were fecund silences. Lakanal was silent, and thought out public national education; Lanthenas was silent, and created the primary schools; Revellière-Lepaux was silent, and dreamed of elevating philosophy to the dignity of religion. Others busied themselves with questions of detail, less pretentious and more practical. Guyton-Morveaux studied the salubrity of hospitals; Maire, the abolition of actual servitude; Jean-Bon-Saint-André, the suppression of arrest and imprisonment for debt; Romme, the proposition of Chappe; Duboë, the ordering of the archives; Coren-Fustier, the creation of the cabinet of Anatomy and the Museum of Natural History; Guyomard, river navigation and the damming of the Escaut.