[148] Such is the soul of
Saint-Just, and only that. All other sentiments merely serve to
harden it; all the metallic agencies that compose it - sensuality,
vanity, every vice, every species of ambition, all the frantic
outbursts and melancholy vaporings of his youth - are violently
commingled and fused together in the revolutionary mold, so that his
soul may take the form and rigidity of trenchant steel. Suppose this
an animated blade, feeling and willing in conformity with its temper
and structure; it would delight in being brandished, and would need to
strike; such is the need of Saint-Just. Taciturn, impassible, keeping
people at a distance, as imperious as if the entire will of the people
and the majesty of transcendent reason resided in his person, he seems
to have reduced his passions to the desire of dashing everything to
atoms, and to creating dismay. It may be said of him that, like the
conquering Tartars, he measures his self-attributed grandeur by what
he fells; no other has so extensively swept away fortunes, liberties
and lives; no other has so terrifically heightened the effect of his
deeds by laconic speech and the suddenness of the stroke.
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