and which, authorizing spies
or paid informers, is to provide the guillotine with those vast batches
which purge and clean prisons out in a trice."[31171]--"I am not
responsible," he states later on...." My lack of power to do any good,
to arrest the evil, forced me for more than six weeks to abandon my post
on the Committee of Public Safety."[31172] To ruin his adversaries by
murders committed by him, by those which he makes them commit and which
he imputes to them, to whitewash himself and blacken them with the same
stroke of the brush, what intense delight! If the natural conscience
murmurs in whispers at moments, the acquired superposed conscience
immediately imposes silence, concealing personal hatreds under public
pretexts: the guillotined, after all, were aristocrats, and whoever
comes under the guillotine is immoral. Thus, the means are good and the
end better; in employing the means, as well as in pursuing the end, the
function is sacerdotal.

Such is the scenic exterior of the Revolution, a specious mask with a
hideous visage beneath it, under the reign of a nominal humanitarian
theory, covering over the effective dictatorship of evil and low
passions. In its true representative, as in itself, we see ferocity
issuing from philanthropy, and, from the pedant (cuistre), the
executioner.

*****

[Footnote 3101: Harmand (de la Meuse): "Anecdotes relatives a la
Revolution." "He was dressed like a tough cab-driver. He had a disturbed
look and an eye always in motion; he acted in an abrupt, quick and
jerky way. A constant restlessness gave a convulsive contraction to his
muscles and features which likewise affected his manner of walking so
that he didn't walk but hopped."]

[Footnote 3102: Chevremont, "Jean Paul Marat;" also Alfred Bougeard,
"Marat" passim. These two works, with numerous documents, are panegyrics
of Marat.--Bougeat, I., II (description of Marat by Fabre d'Eglantine);
II., 259 and I., 83.--"Journal de la Republique Francaise," by Marat,
No.93, January 9, 1793. "I devote only two out of the twenty four
hours to sleep, and only one hour to my meals, toilette and domestic
necessities... I have not taken fifteen minutes recreation for more than
three years."]

[Footnote 3103: Chevremont, I., pp. I and 2. His family, on the father's
side, was Spanish, long settled in Sardinia. The father, Dr. Jean Mara,
had abandoned Catholicism and removed to Geneva where he married a
woman of that city; he aft