ily represent this power,
it is essential to have a soul of steel.[32148] Such is the soul of
Saint-Just, and only that. All other sentiments merely serve to harden
it; all the metallic agencies that compose it--sensuality, vanity,
every vice, every species of ambition, all the frantic outbursts and
melancholy vaporings of his youth--are violently commingled and fused
together in the revolutionary mold, so that his soul may take the form
and rigidity of trenchant steel. Suppose this an animated blade, feeling
and willing in conformity with its temper and structure; it would
delight in being brandished, and would need to strike; such is the need
of Saint-Just. Taciturn, impassible, keeping people at a distance,
as imperious as if the entire will of the people and the majesty of
transcendent reason resided in his person, he seems to have reduced his
passions to the desire of dashing everything to atoms, and to creating
dismay. It may be said of him that, like the conquering Tartars, he
measures his self-attributed grandeur by what he fells; no other has so
extensively swept away fortunes, liberties and lives; no other has so
terrifically heightened the effect of his deeds by laconic speech and
the suddenness of the stroke. He orders the arrest and close confinement
of all former nobles, men and women, in the four departments, in
twenty-four hours; he orders the bourgeoisie of Strasbourg to pay over
nine millions in twenty-four hours; ten thousand persons in Strasbourg
must give up their shoes in twenty-four hours; random and immediate
discharges of musketry on the officers of the Rhine army--such are the
measures.[32149] So much the worse for the innocent; there is no time
to discern who they are; "a blind man hunting for a pin in a dust-heap
takes the whole heap."[32150]--And, whatever the order, even when it
cannot be executed, so much the worse for him to whom it is given, for
the captain who, directed by the representative to establish this or
that battery in a certain time, works all night with all his forces,
"with as many men as the place will hold."[32151] The battery not
being ready at the hour named, Saint-Just sends the captain to the
guillotine.--The sovereign having once given an order it cannot be
countermanded; to take back his words would be weakening himself;[32152]
in the service of omnipotence, pride is insatiable, and, to mollify it,
no barbaric act is too great.--The same appetite is visible in Collot