Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
Collot d'Herbois incredulous, half-contemptuous, did not altogether approve of these schemes which seemed to him wild and uncanny: he like the direct simplicity of a summary trial, of the guillotine, or of his own well stage-managed "Noyades."
From this moment Billaud Varennes and Collot d'Herbois concluded their destruction to be certain. In vain they soothed, expostulated with, and endeavoured to mollify St. Just, so as to avert an open rupture. The latter, who probably knew it was not Robespierre's intention to accede to any arrangement, left them to make his report.
When the terrible Danton exclaimed, "The kings of Europe menace us; it behooves us to defy them; let us throw down to them the head of a king as our gage!" these detestable words, followed by so cruel a result, formed, however, a formidable stroke of policy. But the Queen! What urgent reasons of state could Danton, Collot d'Herbois, and Robespierre allege against her?
Disappointed play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious. Why not? Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than had our own Pitt and Burke.
Only a few days before Cécile Renault's visit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot d'Herbois on the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for the excitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play the martyr, as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens' rusty pen-knife.
"Unanimously," with approving and enthusiastic cheers, manifesting the warmest sympathy for Collot d'Herbois, Couthon, and Robespierre, the Convention, through multiplied and spontaneous re-elections, maintains the homicidal government which the Plain detests, because it is homicidal, and which the Mountain detests, because it is decimated by it.
You will find even more than my customary incorrectness and want of method since we left Peronne; but I shall not allow your competency as a critic, until you have been a prisoner in the hands of French republicans. Perhaps the Committee of Public Welfare are now in a sort of benevolent indecision, whether this, or Collot d'Herbois' gunpowder scheme, shall have the preference.
"An assumption of authority," commented Chauvelin quietly, "to which your position here does not entitle you, Citizen Collot." Collot d'Herbois lounged lazily forward, and presently he threw his ill-knit figure into the chair lately vacated by Marguerite. His heavy, square face bore distinct traces of the fatigue endured in the past twenty-four hours on horseback or in jolting market waggons.
He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers, quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his nation. His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d'Herbois, and other wicked offsprings of rebellion.
"Why these unusual honours, and this reply of the president to the minister?" said Collot d'Herbois. "If he comes here as a minister, there is no reply to make him. If he comes here as an associate and a brother, he does no more than his duty; he only raises himself to the level of our opinions. There is but one answer to be made, let him act as he has spoken."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking