This phrase had branded him on the brow with the mark of a
ringleader of faction. Barnave was not this, or only as much so as was
necessary for the success of his discourses; nothing in him was extreme
but the orator: the man was by no means so, neither was he at all cruel.
Studious, but without imagination; copious, but without warmth, his
intellect was mediocre, his mind honest, his will variable, his heart in
the right place. His talent, which they affected to compare with
Mirabeau's, was nothing more than a power of skilfully rivetting public
attention. His habit of pleading gave him, with its power of extempore
speaking, an apparent superiority which vanished before reflection,
Mirabeau's enemies had created him a pedestal on their hatred, and
magnified his importance to make the comparison closer. When reduced to
his actual stature, it was easy to recognise the distance that existed
between the man of the nation, and the man of the bar.

Barnave had the misfortune to be the great man of a mediocre party, and
the hero of an envious faction: he deserved a better destiny, which he
subsequently acquired.

XVII.

Still deeper in the shade, and behind the chief of the National
Assembly, a man almost unknown began to move, agitated by uneasy
thoughts which seemed to forbid him to be silent and unmoved; he spoke
on all occasions, and attacked all speakers indifferently, including
Mirabeau himself. Driven from the tribune, he ascended it next day:
overwhelmed with sarcasm, coughed down, disowned by all parties, lost
amongst the eminent champions who fixed public attention, he was
incessantly beaten, but never dispirited. It might have been said, that
an inward and prophetic genius revealed to him the vanity of all talent,
and the omnipotence of a firm will and unwearied patience, and that an
inward voice said to him, "These men who despise thee are thine: all the
changes of this Revolution which now will not deign to look upon thee,
will eventually terminate in thee, for thou hast placed thyself in the
way like the inevitable excess, in which all impulse ends."

This man was Robespierre.

There are abysses that we dare not sound, and characters we desire not
to fathom, for fear of finding in them too great darkness, too much
horror; but history, which has the unflinching eye of time, must not be
chilled by these terrors, she must understand whilst she undertakes to
recount. Maximilien Robespierre was born at Arras,