,
inspired by insanity, he gave his nightly dreams to daily conspiracies.
The Seid of the people, he interested it by his self-devotion to its
interests. He affected mystery like all oracles. He lived in obscurity,
and only went out at night; he only communicated with his fellows with
the most sinistrous precautions. A subterranean cell was his residence,
and there he took refuge safe from poignard and poison. His journal
affected the imagination like something supernatural. Marat was wrapped
in real fanaticism. The confidence reposed in him nearly amounted to
worship. The fumes of the blood he incessantly demanded had mounted to
his brain. He was the delirium of the Revolution, himself a living
delirium!

IX.

Brissot, as yet obscure, wrote _Le Patriote Francais_. A politician, and
aspiring to leading parts, he only excited revolutionary passions in
proportion as he hoped one day to govern by them. At first a
constitutionalist and friend of Necker and Mirabeau, a hireling before
he became a _doctrinaire_, he saw in the people only a sovereign more
suitable to his own ambition. The republic was his rising sun; he
approached it as to his own fortune, but with prudence, and frequently
looking behind him to see if opinion followed his traces.

Condorcet, an aristocrat by genius, although an aristocrat by birth,
became a democrat from philosophy. His passion was the transformation of
human reason. He wrote _La Chronique de Paris_.

Carra, an obscure demagogue, had created for himself a name of fear in
the _Annales Patriotiques_. Freron, in the _Orateur du Peuple_, rivalled
Marat. Fauchet, in the _Bouche de Fer_, elevated democracy to a level
with religious philosophy. The "last not least," Laclos, an officer of
artillery, author of an obscene novel, and the confidant of the Duc
d'Orleans, edited the _Journal des Jacobins_, and stirred up through
France the flame of ideas and words of which the focus was in the clubs.

All these men used their utmost efforts to impel the people beyond the
limits which Barnave had prescribed to the event of the 21st June. They
desired to avail themselves of the instant when the throne was left
empty to obliterate it from the constitution. They overwhelmed the king
with insults and objurgations, in order that the Assembly might not dare
to replace at the head of their institutions a prince whom they had
vilified. They clamoured for interrogatory, sentence, forfeiture,
abdication, impri