518

MARAT AT THE TRIBUNE OF THE CORDELIERS.

And yet his eyes have rather a mild expression. Their brilliancy and transparency, and their strange wandering manner, gazing on vacancy, would lead one to suppose that this must be some visionary, at once a quack and a dupe, pretending to second-sight; a vain and especially credulous streetprophet, believing everything, above all, his own lies, all the involuntary fictions into which he is incessantly impelled by a spirit of exaggeration. His empirical habits, and especially the circumstance of having sold his specifics in the street, give him this turn of mind. The crescendo will be terrible; he must find out or invent, and shout from his cellar at least one miracle every day, and lead on his trembling subscribers through a series of treasons, discoveries, and alarms.

First, he returns thanks to the Assembly.

Next, his face begins to glow. He has a great terrible treason to unfold! A new plot has been discovered!.. See how happy he is to tremble and make others tremble. See how the conceited and credulous creature has become transfigured! His yellow skin is shining with perspiration.

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Lafayette has ordered fifteen thousand snuff-boxes, all ornamented with his likeness, to be made in the faubourg Saint-Antoine... There is something suspicious in this. I entreat all good citizens who are able to procure any, to destroy them. I am sure that the secret of the great plot will be found in them."*

Some persons laugh; others think that the matter ought to be inquired into; that it is worth while.

Marat continues, with a frown: "I said, three months ago, that there were six hundred guilty persons, and that six hundred ropes would settle the business. What an error! . . We cannot manage now with less than twenty thousand." Thunders of applause!

David are not very striking. One may also consult the likeness in plaster, taken after death, (though, perhaps, it has been corrected a little), and the bust that was at the Cordelier club, (in Colonel Maurin's collection).

*Ami du Peuple, No. 319, Dec. 23, 1790.-Marat's credulity is everywhere conspicuous. In No. 320, Louis XVI. is bitterly weeping over the follies which the Austrian (the queen) has caused him to commit. In No. 321 the queen has given away so many white cockades, that the price of white ribbon has risen three sous an ell. This is a positive fact; for Marat has heard so from one of the maids of La Bertin, (the queen's milliner), &c., &c.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS AGAINST MARAT.

519

Marat was beginning to be the favourite, the idol of the people. In the vast number of attacks and ill-omened predictions with which he filled his newspapers, several had come true, and gained for him the reputation of seer and prophet. Already three battalions of the Parisian guard had prepared for him a petty triumph, which ended in nothing, promenading his bust crowned with flowers through the streets. His autho

rity had not reached the terrible point that it attained in 1793; and Desmoulins, who respected gods as little as kings, would occasionally laugh at the idol Marat, as much as at the idol Lafayette.

Without paying any attention to the delirious enthusiasm of Legendre, who, transfixed with admiration, was all attention, relishing and believing all he heard, and without remarking his fury at any kind of interruption, the bold little man thus familiarly apostrophised the prophet: "Ever tragic, friend Marat, hypertragic, tragicotatos! We might reproach thee, as the Greeks did Eschylus, with being rather too ambitious of this surname. . . But, no; thou hast an excuse; thy vagabond life in the catacombs, like that of the primitive Christians, fires thy imagination . . . Come, tell us seriously, are these nineteen thousand four hundred heads that thou addest, by way of amplification, to the six hundred of the other day,—are they really indispensable? Wilt thou not bate one? We must not do extravagantly what may be done economically. I should have thought that three or four plumed heads, rolling at the feet of Liberty, would have sufficed for the catastrophe of the drama."

The partisans of Marat were furious with indignation; but a noise is heard at the door, a friendly hum of welcome, that prevents them from replying; and a young lady enters and desires to speak. Why, this is no other than Mademoiselle Théroigne, the handsome amazon of Liege! Behold her in her red silk riding-habit, and armed with her large sabre of the 5th of October. The enthusiasm is at its height. "It is the Queen of Sheba," cries Desmoulins, "who has come to pay a visit to the Solomon of our district."

She has already passed through the whole of the Assembly, with the springing gait of a panther, and ascended the tribune. Her beautiful, inspired countenance, beaming with enthusiasm,

520 THÉROIGNE AT THE CLUB OF THE CORDELIERS.

appears between the sombre apocalyptic visages of Danton and Marat.

"If you are truly Solomons," said Théroigne, "you will prove it by building the temple, the temple of liberty, the palace of the National Assembly. And you will build it on the spot where the Bastille formerly stood.

"What! whilst the executive power inhabits the finest palace in the world, the pavilion of Flora and the porticoes of the Louvre, the legislative power is still encamped in tents, at the Tennis-Court, the Menus, or the Riding-School-like Noah's dove, that can find no resting-place?

"Things cannot remain so. The people must learn, by simply beholding the edifices which the two powers inhabit, where sovereign power resides. What is a sovereign without a palace, or a god without an altar? Who will acknowledge his worship?

"Let us build up that altar; and let all contribute, bringing their gold and precious stones (for my part, here are mine). Let us build up the only true temple. No other is worthy of God than that where they pronounced the declaration of the rights of man. As guardian of that temple, Paris will be less a city than the common Patria of all others, the meeting-place of the tribes, their Jerusalem!"

"The Jerusalem of the world!" exclaimed the enthusiastic auditory; for a real frenzy, an ecstatic joy, had possessed the whole Assembly. If the ancient Cordeliers, who had formerly given free course to their mystic ravings, under those same vaulted roofs, had returned that evening, they would still have found themselves at home among their fellows; for, all of them, whether believers or philosophers, disciples of Rousseau, Diderot, Holbach, or Helvetius, all prophesied, in spite of themselves.

The German Anacharsis Clootz was, or imagined himself to be, an atheist, like so many others, from hatred of the evils that priests have occasioned (Tantùm relligio potuit suadere malorum!) But with all his cynicism and his ostentation of doubt, this son of the Rhine, and fellow-countryman of Beethofelt strongly all the emotion of the new religion. The most sublime words inspired by the great confederation are in a letter from Clootz to Madame de Beauharnais; nor did any

ven,

ANACHARSIS CLOOTZ.

521

body express any more strangely beautiful on the future unity of the world. His accent, his German slowness of utterance, his smiling serene countenance, and that beatitude of a mad genius, inclined to jest with itself, added amusement to enthusiasm.

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'Why, indeed, has nature," said he, "placed Paris at an equal distance from the pole and the equator, but for it to be a cradle and a metropolis for the general confederation of mankind? Here, the States-General of the world will assemble; and I predict that the time is not so remote as people believe. Let but the Tower of London fall to pieces, like that of Paris, and tyrants will be no more. The flag of the French cannot wave over London and Paris, without soon being hoisted all round the globe. . . Then there will be no longer either provinces, armies, conquerors, nor conquered nations... People will go from Paris to Pekin, as they do from Bordeaux to Strasbourg; the ocean, by a bridge of ships, will join her shores; and the east and the west will embrace in the field of confederation. Rome was the metropolis of the world by war; Paris will be so by peace. Yes, the more I reflect, the more I conceive the possibility of one single nation, and the facility with which the Universal Assembly, sitting at Paris, will conduct the government of the whole human race. Ye rivals of Vitruvius, listen to the oracle of reason; if universal patriotism kindles your genius, you will know well how to make us a temple to contain all the represensatives of the world; there are wanting scarcely more than ten thousand.

"Men will be what they ought to be, when each will be able to say: The world is my country, the world is my own native land.' Then, there will be no more emigrants. There is but one nature, and one society. Divided powers clash together, and nations are like clouds which necessarily burst against each other.

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Tyrants, your thrones are crumbling beneath you. Abdicate, and you shall suffer neither misery nor the scaffold... Ye usurpers of sovereignty, look me in the face. Do you not behold your sentence written on the walls of the National Assembly?... Come, do not wait for the fusion of sceptres and crowns; come forth to welcome a Revolution which delivers kings from the snares of kings, and nations from the rivalry of nations ! '

522

TWOFOLD SPIRIT OF THE CORDELIERS.

"Let

"Long live Anacharsis ! exclaimed Desmoulins. us open with him the cataracts of heaven. It is nothing that reason has drowned despotism in France; it must also inundate the globe; and all the thrones of kings and Lamas must be washed from their foundations by this universal deluge... What a career from Sweden to Japan! The Tower of London is shaken. An innumerable meeting of Irish Jacobins has had, for its first sittings, an insurrection. At the rapid rate at which things are going, I would not give a shilling for the estates of the clergy of the Church of England. As for Pitt, he is destined to be hanged (lanterné), unless, by the loss of his place, he prevent the loss of his head, which John Bull is about to demand... The inquisitors are already being hanged on the Manganarez; the breath of liberty is blowing strong from France to the South; and presently people may safely say— There are no longer any Pyrenees !'

"Clootz has just transported me, as the angel did the prophet Habakkuk, into the upper regions of policy; and I now throw back the barrier of the Revolution to the uttermost parts of the world! "'*

Such is the originality of the Cordeliers. It is Voltaire among fanatics! For indeed this amusing Desmoulins is a true son of Voltaire; and one is surprised to behold him in this pandemonium, and to hear his good sense, reason, and lively sallies, in this fantastical assembly, where one would say that our prophets of the Cevennes, the inspired members of the Long Parliament, the quakers and shakers, had met together. The Cordeliers, properly speaking, form the connecting link of ages; their genius, like Diderot's,—at once a sceptic and a believer, -recals to mind, at the end of the eighteenth century, some

* I need hardly say that I have derived the whole of this chapter from Desmoulins and Marat's newspapers, merely joining what is there divided, and scarcely changing a word. Desmoulins, after expressing his half-serious halfcomic enthusiasm for the ideas of Clootz, adds, in order to mingle the utile dulci: "I was about to lay down my pen; for the deafness of an ungrateful people had discouraged me. I now conceive hope, and establish my newspaper as a permanent journal... We invite our dear and beloved subscribers, whose subscription is now expiring, to renew it, not in Rue de Seine, but at our house, Rue de Théâtre-Français, where we shall continue to cultivate a branch of commerce hitherto unknown, a manufactory of revolutions."