CHARGES OF VENALITY

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did not save much; and well it was for him that he did not. For at a time when charges of venality were scattered broadcast by and at everyone, when Royalists, Girondins, Jacobins, Mirabeau, Brissot, Isnard, Vergniaud, Guadet, Fauchet, Condorcet, Grégoire, Pétion, Lacroix, Desmoulins, Fabre d'Eglantine, Marat, Chaumette, Merlin of Thionville, Chabot, were all tarred with the same brush by their respective enemies, who often specified the exact price for which a man sold himself; when, in the Princesse de Lamballe's memoirs we are told to a franc the sum by which the Incorruptible himself was corrupted, a fortune left by Danton would never have been believed to have been amassed by fair means. What webs of falsehood his enemies would have woven round him if they had found fit material we may guess from those which spider-like they spun out of their own bowels. Mirabeau mentions his having been given 30,000 francs in March 1791. Lafayette says that his compensation for his office in 1791 was really a bribe of 90,000 francs from the Court. Brissot, with Bertrand de Molevile, raises the sum to 300,000 francs, Brissot saying he had seen his receipt for it, though Lafayette says that Montmorin told Danton it was burnt. And if every charge were taken as true, the total of his illicit gains would amount to two million francs and more. Two years after he was in receipt of a very considerable income, he was, according to Mme. Roland, a wretched advocate more burdened with debts than causes, whose wife said she could not have kept house without the help of a guinea a week from her father.'

Lafayette's charge is precise. Had he himself published his venomous accusations he would possibly have been less positive. But little did he and his congeners

dream that the day would come when every detail of Danton's indemnification for his avocatship as well as of its acquisition would be brought to light, to Danton's honour and their shame. The fact was that while Lafayette supposed him to be bribed by Mirabeau, Mirabeau considered him the creature of Lafayette, and they and Brissot repeated every gutter story till perhaps they even came to believe them, involving themselves thereby in hopeless absurdities and self-contradiction. Proof they had none, unless the assertion of Brissot, which clashes with Lafayette's in two points, is proof. But Brissot was a needy man himself, charged with accepting bribes-one of 6,000 francs a month, and for other service 300,000 francs down. He was author of the axiom that property is a theft, was charged with the theft of other people's property, and, by Peltier, with being himself Montmorin's murderer. No one would believe Peltier, but the lines he quotes are suggestive:

Haine de philosophe est un feu qui dévore:

Haine de Gazetier est cent fois pis encore.

Moreover, if Brissot could have shamed Danton, why did he not do so when they were enemies, and during the death-struggle of the Girondins and the Mountain? Such proof as has come to hand since Lafayette's day has been all against Lafayette, and the historian who in one edition most relied on him when assailing Danton's reputation has been forced in another to admit that he had been leaning on a broken reed.

We who know that not one scrap of evidence against Danton was ever found in the iron cupboard, or the King's desk, or the secret accounts of Montmorin, or those of the Intendant of the civil list, Laporte, inven

EVIDENCE OF INNOCENCE

13

toried by Danton's enemies, the Girondins, and printed by order of the Convention; that no evidence of his venality was produced at his trial; that in Paris he lived in a small unpretentious house in a side street; that the country houses, modest enough as one may still judge from engravings of that at Sèvres, which he was said to have kept up were the property, first one then the other, of his father-in-law; that he himself, at his trial, summoned as a witness in his behalf the landlord at whose house his orgies' were said to have been held, and that the Court would not let the witness be called; that at a time of incessant surveillance over, and preternatural suspicion of, rich men, orgies which could have swallowed up 2,000,000 francs, even if otherwise credible, would have been impossible for a popular leader; would, in fact, have brought him post-haste to the guillotine; that the lists of proprietors of the theatre in which he is said to have speculated do not contain his name; that no estate purchased for him by an agent was ever inherited by his family or has otherwise been accounted for; and that the whole of the fortune he left at his death was some three or four thousand pounds, may confidently pronounce Danton Not Guilty of charges as rancorous as they are unproved, and appreciate his own words to Courtois, 'I shouldn't know how to spend 50,000 livres prudently if I had them. The fear of misusing such a sum, even more than of having Hébert and his gang at my heels, would hinder me from dreaming of its acquisition.'1

See Appendix A, Danton's Income.'

CHAPTER II

REASONS FOR BECOMING A POLITICIAN-CAUSES OF THE REVOLU TION-MISERY OF THE PEOPLE-TAXATION-PENAL

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FEUDAL BURDENS-CONDUCT OF ARISTOCRACY-ROYAL EXTRAVAGANCE

IF Danton were not the needy adventurer of legend it may still seem surprising that when well-to-do and happily married he should have voluntarily launched out of so quiet a haven into the stormy sea of politics. But it would have been far more surprising if he had not done so. He was, as his boyhood shows, a born politician, a born orator, and of a temperament which, while equal to immense effort at a crisis, was indisposed to humdrum drudgery. Moreover, in that stormy decade during which he came to Paris, to be young and able and not a politician was almost impossible. Stupid, indeed, is the criticism which can account only by dishonest motives for such a career as his at such a time. It needed a far less keen vision to foresee the coming decomposition of society, and far less consciousness of ability to make him aspire to preside over its reorganisation. For though it has been said that no man can name the causes of the Revolution, that they are countless, old as the world, beginning at the remotest eras of history-reflections true in a sense of all great historical events-from a less nebulous point of view never were causes more certainly known or susceptible of more exact definition.