The faithful, to obtain access to him form a
line in the court.[111] One by one they are admitted into the
reception room, where they gather around portraits of him drawn with
pencil, in stump, in sepia and in water color, and before miniature
busts in red or gray plaster. Then, on the signal being given by him,
they penetrate through a glass door into the sanctuary where he
presides, into the private closet in which the best bust of him, with
verses and mottoes, replaces him during his absence. - His
worshippers adore him on their knees, and the women more than the men.
On the day he delivers his apology before the Convention "the passages
are lined with women[112] . . . . seven or eight hundred of them
in the galleries, and but two hundred men at most;" and how
frantically they cheer him! He is a priest surrounded by
devotees."[113] In the Jacobin club, when he delivers his "amphigory,"
there are sobs of emotion, "outcries and stamping of feet almost
making the house tumble."[114] An onlooker who shows no emotion is
greeted with murmurs and obliged to slip out, like a heretic that has
strayed into a church on the elevation of the Host. - The faster the
revolutionary thunderbolts fall on other heads, so does Robespierre
mount higher and higher in glory and deification.
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