- With the
sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has made
his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at the
Commune, he estimates forty thousand as the number of heads that
should be laid low.[41] Six weeks later, the social abscess having
enormously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now demands
two hundred and seventy thousand heads,[42] always on the score of
humanity, "to ensure public tranquility," on condition that the
operation be entrusted to him, as the temporary enforcer of the
justice. - Except for this last point, the rest is granted to him; it
is unfortunate that he could not see with his own eyes the complete
fulfillment of his programme, the batches condemned by the
revolutionary Tribunal, the massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the
drownings of Nantes. - From the beginning to the end, he was in
keeping with the Revolution, lucid on account of his blindness, thanks
to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his personal malady
with the public malady, to the early manifestation of his complete
madness in the midst of the incomplete or tardy madness of the rest,
he alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, perched aloft at the
first bound on the sharp pinnacle which his rivals dared not climb or
only stumbled up.
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