All is
a sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word
ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as
statesman, because the studied elegance of the closet become pistol
shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed
sends a man to the guillotine. - The contrast is too great between
his talent and the part he plays. With such a talent, as mediocre and
false as his intellect, there is no employment for which he is less
suited than that of governing men; he was cut out for another, which,
in a peaceable community, he would have been able to do. Suppress the
Revolution, and Marat would have probably ended his days in an asylum.
Danton might possibly have become a legal filibuster, a highwayman or
gangster, and finally throttled or hung. Robespierre, on the
contrary, might have continued as he began,[101] a busy, hard-working
lawyer of good standing, member of the Arras Academy, winner of
competitive prizes, author of literary eulogies, moral essays and
philanthropic pamphlets; his little lamp, lighted like hundreds of
others of equal capacity at the focus of the new philosophy, would
have burned moderately without doing harm to any one, and diffused
over a provincial circle a dim, commonplace illumination proportionate
to the little oil his lamp would hold.
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