In dealing with
facts there is nothing in his speech but a perversion of the truth;
impostures abound in it of pure invention, palpable, as brazen as
those of a charlatan in his booth;[69] he does not even deign to
disguise them with a shadow of probability; as to the Girondists, and
as to Danton, Fabre d'Eglantine and his other adversaries, whoever
they may be, old or new, any rope to hang them with suffices for him;
any rough, knotted, badly-twisted cord he can lay his hands on, no
matter what, provided it strangles, is good enough; there is no need
of a finer one for confirmed conspirators; with the gossip of the club
and an Inquisition catechism, he can frame his bill of indictment. -
Accordingly, his intellect grasps nothing and yields him nothing; he
is a sententious and overexcited declaimer, an artificial spirit
always on the stretch, full of affectations,[70] his talent reducing
itself down to the rare flashes of a somber imagination, a pupil of
Robespierre, as Robespierre himself is a pupil of Rousseau, the
exaggerated scholar of a plodding scholar, always rabidly ultra,
furious through calculation, deliberately violating both language and
ideas,[71] confining himself to theatrical and funereal paradoxes, a
sort of "grand vizier"[72] with the airs of an exalted moralist and
the bearing of the sentimental shepherd.
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