d only the baseness of
crime--Danton's vices partook of the heroic--his intellect was all but
genius. He had upon him the bright flash of circumstances, but it was as
sinister as his face. Immorality, which was the infirmity of his mind,
was in his eyes the essence of his ambition; he cultivated it in himself
as the element of future greatness. He pitied any body who respected any
thing. Such a man had of necessity a vast ascendency over the bad
passions of the multitude. He kept them in continual agitation, and
always boiling on the surface ready to flow into any torrent, even if it
were of blood.

XXII.

Brissot de Warville was another of these popular candidates for the
representation. As this individual was the root of the Girondist party,
the first apostle and first martyr of the republic, we ought to know
him. Brissot was the son of a pastrycook at Chartres, and had received
his education in that city with Petion, his fellow countryman. An
adventurer in literature, he had begun by assuming the name of
_Warville_, which concealed his own. It is a plebeian nobility not to
blush at one's father's name. Brissot had not done so. He began by
furtively appropriating one of the titles of that aristocracy of races
against which he was about to raise equality. Like Rousseau in every
thing but his genius, he sought his fortune hither and thither, and
descended even lower than he into misery and intrigue, before he
acquired celebrity. Dispositions become weakened and stained by such a
struggle with the difficulties of life in the dregs of great corrupted
cities. Rousseau had paraded his indigence and his reveries in the bosom
of nature; and as its consideration calms and purifies everything he
quitted it a philosopher. Brissot had dragged his misery and vanity into
the heart of Paris and of London, and into those haunts of infamy in
which adventurers and pamphleteers drag on a filthy existence: he left
them an intriguer. Yet in the very midst of these vices which had
rendered his honesty dubious, and name bespotted, he nurtured in the
depths of his soul three virtues capable of again elevating him--an
unshaken love for a young girl, whom he married in spite of his family,
a love of occupation, and a courage against the difficulties of life,
which he had afterwards to display in the face of death. His philosophy
was identical with Rousseau's. He believed in God. He had faith in
liberty, truth, and virtue. He had in his sou