orthodox, charlatans disguised as patriots, and
pashas disguised as sans-culottes?[31138] Add all this vermin to
that which Marat seeks to crush out; it is no longer by hundreds of
thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jeanbon-Saint-Andre and
Guffroy, that the guilty must be counted and cut off their heads!--And
all these heads, Robespierre, according to his maxims, must strike off.
He is well aware of this; hostile as his intellect may be to precise
ideas, he, when alone in his closet, face to face with himself, sees
clearly, as clearly as Marat. Marat's chimera, on first spreading out
its wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel house;
that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, reaches the goal
in its turn; in its turn, it demands something to feed on, and the
rhetorician, the professor of principles, begins to assess the voracity
of the monstrous brute on which he is mounted. Slower than the other,
this one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and teeth,
it has a vaster appetite. At the end of three years Robespierre has
overtaken Marat, at that distant end of the line, at the station
where Marat had established himself from the very beginning, and the
theoretician now adopts the policy, the aim, the means, the work, and
almost the vocabulary of a maniac:[31139]

armed dictatorship of the urban mob,
systematic perturbation of the bribed rabble,
war against the bourgeoisie,
extermination of the rich,

placing opposition writers, administrators and deputies outside the law.

Both monsters get the same food; only, to the ration of his monster,
Robespierre adds "vicious men" as its special and favorite prey.
Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his
rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to
heaven, he cannot avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet
the streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the
insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he rides.[31140]
These ever open and hungry jaws must be daily fed with an ampler supply
of human flesh; not only is he bound to let it eat, but to furnish the
food, often with his own hands, except that he must afterwards wash
them, declaring, and even believing, that no spot of blood has ever
soiled them. He is generally content to caress and flatter the brute, to
excuse it, to let it go on. Nevertheless, more than once, tempted