mustache, his triple belt of
pistols, his coarse language, his oaths, he looks like a pirate."
By their side we encounter a little hump-backed lawyer named
Cuirette-Verrieres, an unceasing speaker, who, on the 6th of October,
1789, paraded the city on a large white horse and afterwards pleaded for
Marat, which two qualifications with his Punch figure, fully establish
him in the popular imagination; the rugged guys, moreover, who hold
nocturnal meetings at Santerre's needed a writer and he probably met
their requirements.--This secret society can count on other faithfuls.
"Briere, wine-dealer, Nicolas, a sapper in the 'Enfants Trouves'
battalion, Gonor, claiming to be one of the victors of the
Bastille,"[2527] Rossignol, an old soldier and afterwards a
journeyman-jeweler, who, after presiding at the massacres of La
Force, is to become an improvised general and display his incapacity,
debauchery, and thievery throughout La Vendee. "There are yet more of
them," Huguenin undoubtedly, a ruined ex-lawyer, afterwards carabineer,
then a deserter, next a barrier-clerk, now serving as spokesman for
the Faubourg St. Honore and finally president of the September commune;
there was also, doubtless, St. Huruge alias Pere Adam, the great barker
of the Palais-Royal, a marquis fallen into the gutter, drinking with and
dressing like a common porter, always flourishing an enormous club and
followed by the riffraff.[2528]--These are all the leaders. The Jacobins
of the municipality and of the Assembly confine their support of
the enterprise to conniving at it and to giving it their
encouragement.[2529] It is better for the insurrection to seem
spontaneous. Through caution or shyness the Girondins, Petion, Manual
and Danton himself, keep in the background----there is not reason for
their coming forward.--The rest, affiliated with the people and lost in
the crowd, are better qualified to fabricate the story which their flock
will like. This tale, adapted to the crowd's intellectual limits, form
and activity, is both simple and somber, such as children like, or
rather a melodrama taken from an alien stage in which the good appear
on one side, and the wicked on the other with an ogre or tyrant in the
center, some infamous traitor who is sure to be unmasked at the end of
the piece and punished according to his deserts, the whole grandiloquent
terms and, as a finale, winding up with a grand chorus. In the raw brain
of an over-excited workman poli