rden of the Palais Royal, on the first
outbreak of the month of July, 1789, preserved in his style, which was
frequently very brilliant, something of his early character. It was the
sarcastic genius of Voltaire descended from the saloon to the pavement.
No man in himself ever personified the people better than did Camille
Desmoulins. He was the mob with his turbulent and unexpected movements,
his variableness, his unconnectedness, his rages interrupted by
laughter, or suddenly sinking into sympathy and sorrow for the very
victims he immolated. A man, at the same time so ardent and so trifling,
so trivial and so inspired, so indecisive between blood and tears, so
ready to crush what he had just deified with enthusiasm, must have the
more empire over a people in revolt, in proportion as he resembled them.
His character was his nature. He not only aped the people, he was the
people himself. His newspapers cried in the public streets, and their
sarcasm, bandied from mouth to mouth, has not been swept away with the
other impurities of the day. He remains, and will remain, a Menippus,
the satirist stained with blood. It was the popular chorus which led the
people to their most important movements, and which was frequently
stifled by the whistling of the cord of the street lamp, or in the
hatchet-stroke of the guillotine. Camille Desmoulins was the remorseless
offspring of the Revolution,--Marat was its fury; he had the clumsy
tumblings of the brute in his thought, and its gnashing of teeth in his
style. His journal (_L'Ami du Peuple_), the People's Friend, smelt of
blood in every line.

VIII.

Marat was born in Switzerland. A writer without talent, a _savant_
without reputation, with a desire for fame without having received from
society or nature the means of acquiring either, he revenged himself on
all that was great not only in society but in nature. Genius was as
hateful to him as aristocracy. Wherever he saw any thing elevated or
striking he hunted it down as though it were a deadly enemy. He would
have levelled creation. Equality was his mania, because superiority was
his martyrdom; he loved the Revolution because it brought down all to
his level; he loved it even to blood, because blood washed out the stain
of his long-during obscurity; he made himself a public denouncer by the
popular title; he knew that denouncement is flattery to all who tremble,
and the people are always trembling. A real prophet of demagogueism