DANTON 



DANUBE 



675 



in tliis atrocity, for which Marat wim mainly re- 

 !s|nni-ilil'-, 1'iit lie admitted that Huch excesses were 

 incidental to a revolution, ami condone! them aa 

 merely inorhid and passing ebullitions of forces that 

 \\oultt yet How freely in healthy channelM. 



D.inton voti-d for the death of the king (January 

 1703), was one of the nine original members of the 

 ('ommittn- of I'nlilic Safety, and frequently \\--nt 

 on iiii-Moiia to Dumouriez and other republican 

 generals. In the Convention he now bent all 

 lii> giant strength to crush the Girondists, or 

 moderate party, on whose fall the extremists 

 found themselves supreme. But he could not re- 

 strain the forces he had created, and his heart filled 

 with ineffectual pity when the heads of opponents 

 against whom he had thundered in debate fell 

 under the merciless guillotine of the triumph- 

 ant Mountain (October 1793). Danton was chietly 

 instrumental in setting up a strong central autho- 

 rity in the Committee of Public Safety and invest- 

 ing it with dictatorial powers, but he elected not to 

 belong to it himself. Henceforth all his energies 

 were devoted at once to fire the hearts of French- 

 men against the foreign enemy, and to conciliate 

 domestic hatreds. He strove with all his might 

 to abate the fanatical and pitiless severity of the 

 revolutionary tribunal, but although Hebert and his 

 party were cut off, Danton's policy of clemency 

 failed to commend itself to the Mountain, whose 

 ferocious instincts saw a more promising leader in 

 the narrow and acrid Robespierre. A fruitless 

 attempt was made to reconcile the two, but their 

 interview left them worse friends than before. 

 Meantime Danton was strangely careless of his 

 fate. He went awhile for rest to his native Arcis, 

 and forgot all the machinations of his enemies in 

 the quiet of domestic happiness with the wife he had 

 just married. ' I prefer being guillotined to guillo- 

 tining,' he said to a friend a great saying which 

 history will remember. Soon his friends summoned 

 him to return to Paris. When news was brought 

 him that the warrant for his arrest was made out, 

 he said merely, ' They dare not,' and calmly went to 

 sleep as usual. Arrested at last, he carried his head 

 high until his doom : ' I leave the whole business 

 in a frightful welter. Not one of them understands 

 anything of government. Robespierre will follow 

 me ; I drag down Robespierre. Oh, it were better 

 to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with govern- 

 ing of men.' 



On the 2d April 1794 he was brought with 

 Camille Desmouiins and a group of his friends 

 before the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal he 

 had formed a twelvemonth before. Asked his 

 name formally by Fouquier-Tinville, the attorney- 

 general, he replied with more than his customary 

 greatness of phrase : ' My name is Danton : a name 

 tolerably known in the Revolution ; my abode will 

 soon be annihilation ; but I shall live in the Pan- 

 theon of history.' His defence was sublime in its 

 audacity, its incoherence, its mixture of heroism 

 and magnificent buffoonery. ' I sold to the enemy !' 

 he exclaimed, 'A man of my stamp is priceless.' 

 'Do I look like a hypocrite?' was his only answer 

 to one of the absurdest of the charges. The first 

 two days of his trial his mighty voice and passion- 

 ate eloquence moved the people so greatly that 

 the Committee of Public Safety in terror hastily 

 concocted a decree that the mouths of men who 

 had 'insulted Justice' should 1x5 shut; and only 

 with this shameful outrage upon justice were his 

 enemies able to send to his doom the greatest figure 

 that fell in the Revolution ( April 5, 1794). At the 

 %>t of the scaffold the thought of his much-loved 

 wife filled his heart, but with the words, ' Danton, 

 no weakness,' he nerved his heart to die' as he had 

 lived. To the headsman he said, 'Thou wilt show 

 my head to the people ; it is worth showing. ' 



The outlines of the Titan of the Revolution in 

 Carlyle's glowing paged are none too heroic ; hia 

 Htory in written large on the annalnof bin turn-. 



See aUo French work* by Rohinet and Bougeart, and 

 KnglUh work* by Delloo ( 1880) and lfely ( 18W). 



Dantsic. See DANZIG. 



Danube ( Lat. Dunutnnt ; in the lower course, 

 later; tier. Donun ; Hung. Dimu ; Slav. Lfunai), 

 the second river of Europe, inferior only to the 

 Volga, has its origin in the Brege and Brigach, two 

 mountain-streams rising in the Black forest, in 

 Baden, and uniting at Donaueschingen, 2204 feet 

 above sea-level. The Danube has a total length, 

 including windings, of 1740 miles, and drains an 

 area estimated at 315,000 sq. m. It flows first SK. 

 to Gutmadingen, and then N K. to Ulm (1519 feet 

 ulxivc sea-level), which may be taken as the limit 

 of its upper course. A few miles above Ulm it 

 receives on its right bank the Iller, from which point 

 it is navigable for boats of 100 tons. At Regens- 

 burg ( Ratisbon ) the river reaches its most northerly 

 point ( 49 2' ), and from thence its course is gen- 

 erally SE. to the northern frontier of Bulgaria. 

 Between Ulm and Passau, where it leaves Ger- 

 man territory, it receives, among other tribu- 

 taries, the three large alpine streams, the Lech, 

 Isar, and Inn, on the right, and the Altmiihl and 

 Regen on the left bank. At Passau its width is 

 231 yards, and its depth 16 feet. The crystalline 

 rocks of the Bohemian Forest mountains follow the 

 stream into Austria, and as far as Aschach its 

 banks are wild and picturesque. It flows E. to 

 Presburg with little variation of course, receiving 

 the Ens from the S., and the March or Morava from 

 the N. ; and it passes from the Austrian dominions 

 through an opening, called the Carpathian Gate, 

 between the Leitha chain and the Lesser Car- 

 pathians, where its width is 320 yards, and its 

 depth 20 feet. Between Presburg and Komorn 

 the stream divides, and forms the Great and Little 

 Schutten, or alluvial islands. Near Waitzen it 

 turns directly S., and enters upon the Hungarian 

 plain, a vast sandy alluvial flat, in which it is con- 

 tinually forcing new channels and silting up old 

 ones ; it maintains this course for 230 miles, receiv- 

 ing from the N. the Waag and the Gran, while the 

 Drave from the \V. adds considerably to its volume. 



After this last accession, the Danube turns again 

 SE., and, increased by the waters of the Theiss and 

 Temes from the N., sweeps past Belgrade, where it 

 is joined by the Save, and forms the l>oundary 

 between Hungary and Servia. At Semlin, near 

 Belgrade, it is 1706 yards wide and 46 feet deep, 

 but the width is greatly contracted by spurs of the 

 Transylvanian and the Servian mountains for 

 75 miles beyond Ujpalanka. Within this stretch 

 are eight distinct rapids, shut in by lofty walls, 

 and strewn with rocky shoals of limestone, crystal- 

 line schists, and granite. The lower Klissura is 

 the most strikingly picturesque of these, but the 

 most difficult passage is the shortest (1$ mile) of 

 the eight the ' Iron Gate,' properly so called, 

 below Orsova, where the middle course of the river 

 ends. Here the stream has a breadth of only 129 

 yards, and the piled-up waters attain a depth of 

 28 fathoms; letlges of rock lift their tooth-like 

 points above the surface, and all around a seething 

 stretch of whirlpools, cataracts, eddies and counter- 

 eddies, combines with the river's rapid fall to 

 present a serious and formerly impassable obstacle 

 to navigation. Many attempts have been made 

 to improve the bed liere, which, under article 57 

 of the Berlin Treaty, Austria hound herself to 

 clear ; but prior to 1889 little hod l>een effected : 

 only when a depth of at least 8 feet covered 

 the obstructions could steamers drawing 5 feet 

 make the ponsoge. From here the Danube enters 

 on the VN allachian depression, and flows in a 



