c aims at on the college bench;[3198]times a grand bravura air,
so essential for parade in public;[3199] centimes a delicate strain of
the flute, for, in those days, one must have a tender heart;[31100]
in short, Marmontel's method in "Belisarius," or that of Thomas in his
"Eloges," all borrowed from Rousseau, but of inferior quality, like a
sharp, thin voice strained to imitate a rich, powerful voice. All is a
sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word
ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as
statesman, because the studied elegance of the closet become pistol
shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed
sends a man to the guillotine.--The contrast is too great between his
talent and the part he plays. With such a talent, as mediocre and false
as his intellect, there is no employment for which he is less suited
than that of governing men; he was cut out for another, which, in
a peaceable community, he would have been able to do. Suppress the
Revolution, and Marat would have probably ended his days in an asylum.
Danton might possibly have become a legal filibuster, a highwayman or
gangster, and finally throttled or hung. Robespierre, on the contrary,
might have continued as he began,[31101] a busy, hard-working lawyer
of good standing, member of the Arras Academy, winner of competitive
prizes, author of literary eulogies, moral essays and philanthropic
pamphlets; his little lamp, lighted like hundreds of others of
equal capacity at the focus of the new philosophy, would have burned
moderately without doing harm to any one, and diffused over a provincial
circle a dim, commonplace illumination proportionate to the little oil
his lamp would hold.

But the Revolution bore him into the Constituent Assembly, where, for a
long time on this great stage, his amour propre, the dominant feeling
of the pedant, suffered terribly. He had already suffered on this score
from his earliest youth, and his wounds being still fresh made him only
the more sensitive.--Born in Arras in 1758, orphaned and poor, protege
of his bishop, a bursar through favor at the college Louis-le-Grand,
later a clerk with Brissot under the revolutionary system of
law-practice, and at length settled down in his gloomy rue des
Rapporteurs as a pettifogger. Living with a bad-tempered sister, he has
adopts Rousseau, whom he had once seen and whom he ardently studies, for
his master in philo