hat
direction; nothing remains but to choose one's path. Mandrin, under the
ancient regime, was also, in a similar way, a superior man;[3153] only
he chose the highway.

Between the demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close: both
are leaders of bands and each requires an opportunity to organize his
band. Danton, to organize his band, needed the Revolution.--"Of low
birth, without patronage," penniless, every office being filled,
and "the Paris bar exorbitantly priced," admitted a lawyer after
"a struggle," he for a long time wandered jobless frequenting the
coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the bars. At
the Cafe de l'Ecole, the proprietor, a good natured old fellow "in a
small round wig, gray coat and a napkin on his arm," circulated among
his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter sat in the rear as
cashier.[3154] Danton chatted with her and demanded her hand in
marriage. To obtain her, he had to mend his ways, purchase an
attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council and find guarantors and
sponsors in his small native town.[3155] Once married and lodged in the
gloomy Passage du Commerce, he finds himself "more burdened with debts
than with causes," tied down to a sedentary profession which demands
vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style and
blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale that,
without the help of a louis regularly advanced to him each week by his
coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends meet.[3156]
His free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent
disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude,
violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness and activity, all
rebel against this life: he is ill-suited for the quiet routine of our
civil careers. It is not the steady discipline of an old society, but
the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces or in a state
of formation, that suits him. In temperament and character he is a
barbarian, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like
this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century.
A giant with the face of a "Tartar," pitted with the small-pox,
tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a
growling "bull-dog,"[3157] with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried
under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice
and moving and acting l