On September 4, 1792, talking
confidentially with P?tion, and hard pressed with the questions that
he put to him, he ends by saying, "Very well, I think that Brissot is
on Brunswick's side."[131] - Naturally, finally, he, like Marat,
imagines the darkest fictions, but they are less improvised, less
grossly absurd, more slowly worked out and more industriously
interwoven in his calculating inquisitorial brain.
"Evidently," he says to Garat, "the Girondists are conspiring."[132]
"And where?" demands Garat.
"Everywhere," Robespierre replies, "in Paris, throughout France, over
all Europe. Gensonn?, at Paris, is plotting in the Faubourg St.
Antoine, going about among the shopkeepers and persuading them that we
patriots mean to pillage their shops. The Gironde (department) has
for a long time been plotting its separation from France so as to join
England; the chiefs of its deputation are at the head of the plot, and
mean to carry it out at any cost. Gensonn? makes no secret of it; he
tells all among them who will listen to him that they are not
representatives of the nation, but plenipotentiaries of the Gironde.
Brissot is plotting in his journal, which is simply a tocsin of civil
war; we know of his going to England, and why he went; we know all
about his intimacy with that Lebrun, minister of foreign affairs, a
Liegois and creature of the Austrian house.
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