Marat's
chimera, on first spreading out its wings, bore its frenzied rider
swiftly onward to the charnel house; that of Robespierre, fluttering
and hobbling along, reaches the goal in its turn; in its turn, it
demands something to feed on, and the rhetorician, the professor of
principles, begins to assess the voracity of the monstrous brute on
which he is mounted. Slower than the other, this one is still more
ravenous, for, with similar claws and teeth, it has a vaster appetite.
At the end of three years Robespierre has overtaken Marat, at that
distant end of the line, at the station where Marat had established
himself from the very beginning, and the theoretician now adopts the
policy, the aim, the means, the work, and almost the vocabulary of a
maniac:[139]
armed dictatorship of the urban mob,
systematic perturbation of the bribed rabble,
war against the bourgeoisie,
extermination of the rich,
placing opposition writers, administrators and deputies outside the
law.
Both monsters get the same food; only, to the ration of his monster,
Robespierre adds "vicious men" as its special and favorite prey.
Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his
rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to
heaven, he cannot avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet
the streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the
insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he rides.
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