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Christmas came, solemn and shrouded in white; and Kate Danton's fair hands decorated the little village church with evergreens and white roses for Father Francis; and Kate Danton's sweet voice sang the dear old "Adeste Fideles" on Christmas morning.
Passions were thus inflamed until even Danton's conduct appeared calm, moderate, and inefficient when compared with the reckless bloodthirstiness of Hébert, now leader of the Exagérés. The latter prevailed, the Vendeans were defeated, and Citizen Carrier of Nantes in three months took fifteen thousand human lives by his fiendishly ingenious systems of drowning and shooting.
While Pétion kept out of the way, it was he who issued commands from the Hôtel de Ville, and when Santerre faltered, it was Danton's friend Westermann who brought up his men to the tryst at the Carrousel. After the king was gone they made their way into the Tuileries, holding parley with the defenders. If there had been anybody left to give orders, bloodshed might have been averted.
"De l'audace," he cried, "encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace." The Assembly had not been responsible for the assault on the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. Filled with conservatives, it lacked the energy. That movement had been the work of a knot of radicals which had its centre in Danton's Club of the Cordeliers.
There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on the eve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on both sides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play of sinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the alleged details are plainly apocryphal.
The mixture of astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's.
"Quite a Canadian baptism, papa," the silvery voice of the young lady said; "I am almost drenched." Grace heard this, and caught a glimpse of Captain Danton's man, Ogden, gallanting a pretty, rosy girl, who looked like a lady's maid, and then, very, very pale, advanced to meet her master and his daughter.
Danton's own chair; into Kate's fairy boudoir, all fluted satin and brocatelle; into her bed-chamber, where everything was white, and azure, and spotless as herself; into Eeny's room, pretty and tasteful, but not so superb; into Rose's, very disordered, and littered, and characteristic; into papa's, big, carpetless, fireless, dreadfully grim and unlike papa himself; into Grace's, the perfection of order and taste, and then Eeny stopped, out of breath.
The old lion of Danton's nature woke again, his indomitable spirit reasserted itself whenever he went to their yard and roused them by his patriotic eloquence. Alas! within the tribunal and on the execution place at the other side of the city, was that going on which shamed patriotism and mocked liberty.
The bride's sisters shared with her the general admiration Mrs. Dr. Danton; Mrs. Stanford, all auburn ringlets, and golden brown silk, and no outward sign of the torments within; Mrs. Harry Danton, fair as a lily, clinging to her sailor-husband's arm, like some spirit of the sea; and last, but not least, Captain Danton's wife, very simply dressed, but looking so quietly happy and serene.
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