[54] Danton chatted with her and demanded her hand in
marriage. To obtain her, he had to mend his ways, purchase an
attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council and find guarantors and
sponsors in his small native town.[55] Once married and lodged in the
gloomy Passage du Commerce, he finds himself "more burdened with debts
than with causes," tied down to a sedentary profession which demands
vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style
and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale
that, without the help of a louis regularly advanced to him each week
by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends
meet.[56] His free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and
indolent disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way,
his rude, violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness and
activity, all rebel against this life: he is ill-suited for the quiet
routine of our civil careers. It is not the steady discipline of an
old society, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces
or in a state of formation, that suits him. In temperament and
character he is a barbarian, and a barbarian born to command his
fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or
baron of the tenth century.
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