ses and perorations, permeating every sentence like the drone of
a bag-pipe.[31109]--Through the delight he takes in this he can listen
to nothing else, and it is just here that the outward echoes supervene
and sustain with their accompaniment the inward cantata which he sings
to his own glory. Towards the end of the Constituent Assembly, through
the withdrawal or the elimination of every man at all able or competent,
he becomes one of the conspicuous tenors on the political stage, while
in the Jacobin Club he is decidedly the tenor most in vogue.--"Unique
competitor of the Roman Fabricius," writes the branch club at Marseilles
to him; "immortal defender of popular rights," says the Jacobin crew of
Bourges.[31110] One of two portraits of him in the exhibition of 1791
bears the inscription: "The Incorruptible." At the Moliere Theatre a
drama of the day represents him as launching the thunderbolts of
his logic and virtue at Rohan and Conde. On his way, at Bapaume,
the patriots of the place, the National Guard on the road and the
authorities, come in a body to honor the great man. The town of Arras
is illuminated on his arrival. On the adjournment of the Constituent
Assembly the people in the street greet him with shouts, crown him with
oak wreaths, take the horses from his cab and drag him in triumph to the
rue St. Honore, where he lodges with the carpenter Duplay.--Here, in
one of those families in which the semi-bourgeois class borders on
the people, whose minds are unsophisticated, and on whom glittering
generalities and oratorical tirades take full hold, he finds his
worshippers; they drink in his words; they have the same opinion of him
that he has of himself; to every person in the house, husband, wife
and daughter, he is the great patriot, the infallible sage; he bestows
benedictions night and morning; he inhales clouds of incense; he is a
god at home. The faithful, to obtain access to him form a line in the
court.[31111] One by one they are admitted into the reception room,
where they gather around portraits of him drawn with pencil, in stump,
in sepia and in water color, and before miniature busts in red or gray
plaster. Then, on the signal being given by him, they penetrate through
a glass door into the sanctuary where he presides, into the private
closet in which the best bust of him, with verses and mottoes, replaces
him during his absence.--His worshippers adore him on their knees, and
the women more than the m