These details were necessary. I could not avoid characterizing the journalist who by his daily calumnies contributed most to undermine the popularity of Bailly. It was requisite besides, once for all, to strip him in this circle of the epithet of philosopher, with which men of the world, and even some historians, inconsiderately gratified him. When a man reveals himself by some brilliant and intelligent works, the public is pleased to find them united with good qualities of the heart. Nor should its joy be less hearty on discovering the absence of all intellectual merit in a man who had before shown himself despicable by his passions, or his vices, or even only by serious blemishes of character. If I have not yet named the enemy of our colleague, if I have contented myself with recounting his actions, it is in order to avoid as much as I can the painful feeling that his name must raise here. Judge, Gentlemen, weigh, my scruples: the furious persecutor of Bailly, of whom I have been talking to you for some minutes, was Marat. The revolution of '89 just occurred in time to relieve the abortive author, physiologist, and physicist from the intolerable position into which he had been thrown by his inability and his quackery. As soon as the revolution had assumed a decided movement, great surprise was occasioned by the sudden transformations excited in the inferior walks of the political world. Marat was one of the most striking examples of these hasty changes of principles. The Neufchatel physician had shown himself a violent adversary to those opinions that occasioned the convocation of the assembly of Notables, and the national commotion in '89. At that time democratical institutions had not a more bitter or more violent censor. Marat liked it to be believed that in quitting France for England, he fled especially from the spectacle of social renovation which was odious to him. Yet a month after the taking of the Bastille, he returned to Paris, established a journal, and from its very beginning left far behind him, even those who, in the hope of making themselves remarkable, thought they must push exaggeration to its very farthest limits. The former connection of Marat with M. de Calonne was perfectly well known; they remembered these words of Pitt's: "The French must go through liberty, and then be brought back to their old government by licence;" the avowed adversaries of revolution testified by their conduct, by their votes, and even by their imprudent words, that according to them, _the worst_ was the only means of returning to what they call _the good_; and yet these instructive comparisons struck only eight or ten members of our great assemblies, so small a share has suspicion in the national character, so painful is distrust to French sincerity. The historians of our troubles themselves have but skimmed the question that I have just raised--assuredly a very important and very curious one.