o for the Dantons, the
Marats, men of relaxed morals or excited brains, who if need be, tramp
in the gutters and roll up their shirt-sleeves; as to himself, he can
do nothing that would ostensibly derange or soil the dress proper to
an honest man and irreproachable citizen. In the Committee of Public
Safety, he merely executes the decrees of the Convention, and the
Convention is always free. He a dictator! He is merely one of seven
hundred deputies, and his authority, if he has any, is simply the
legitimate ascendancy of reason and virtue.[31158] He a murderer! If
he has denounced conspirators, it is the Convention which summons these
before the revolutionary Tribunal,[31159] and the revolutionary Tribunal
pronounces judgment on them. He a terrorist! He merely seeks to simplify
the established proceedings, so as to secure a speedier release of the
innocent, the punishment of the guilty, and the final purgation that
is to render liberty and morals the order of the day.[31160]--Before
uttering all this he almost believes it, and, when he has uttered it he
believes it fully.[31161] When nature and history combine, to produce a
character, they succeed better than man's imagination. Neither Moliere
in his "Tartuffe," nor Shakespeare in his "Richard III.," dared bring
on the stage a hypocrite believing himself sincere, and a Cain that
regarded himself as an Abel.[31162] There he stands on a colossal stage,
in the presence of a hundred thousand spectators, on the 8th of June,
1794, the most glorious day of his life, at that fete in honor of the
Supreme Being, which is the glorious triumph of his doctrine and
the official consecration of his papacy. Two characters are found in
Robespierre, as in the Revolution which he represents: one, apparent,
paraded, external, and the other hidden, dissembled, inward, the latter
being overlaid by the former.--The first one all for show, fashioned
out of purely cerebral cogitations, is as artificial as the solemn farce
going on around him. According to David's programme, the cavalcade
of supernumeraries who file in front of an allegorical mountain,
gesticulate and shout at the command, and under the eyes, of Henriot
and his gendarmes,[31163] manifesting at the appointed time the emotions
which are prescribed for them. At five o'clock in the morning

"friends, husbands, wives, relations and children will embrace....
The old man, his eyes streaming with tears of joy, feels himself
rejuvenated.