France -- History -- Louis XVI, 1774-1793; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
Surely also, in some place not of honour, stands or sprawls up
querulous, that he too, though short, may see,—one squalidest
bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs: Jean Paul Marat
of Neuchâtel! O Marat, Renovator of Human Science, Lecturer on
Optics; O thou remarkablest Horseleech, once in D’Artois’
Stables,—as thy bleared soul looks forth, through thy bleared,
dull-acrid, wo-stricken face, what sees it in all this? Any
faintest light of hope; like dayspring after Nova-Zembla night?
Or is it but _blue_ sulphur-light, and spectres; woe, suspicion,
revenge without end?
Of Draper Lecointre, how he shut his cloth-shop hard by, and
stepped forth, one need hardly speak. Nor of Santerre, the
sonorous Brewer from the Faubourg St. Antoine. Two other Figures,
and only two, we signalise there. The huge, brawny, Figure;
through whose black brows, and rude flattened face (_figure
ecrasée_), there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet
furibund,—he is an esurient, unprovided Advocate; Danton by name:
him mark. Then that other, his slight-built comrade and
craft-brother; he with the long curling locks; with the face of
dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a
naphtha-lamp burnt within it: that Figure is Camille Desmoulins.
A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour; one of the
sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions. Thou poor
Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to
pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong
lightly-sparkling man! But the brawny, not yet furibund Figure,
we say, is Jacques Danton; a name that shall be “tolerably known
in the Revolution.” He is President of the electoral Cordeliers
District at Paris, or about to be it; and shall open his lungs of
brass.
We dwell no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude: for now,
behold, the Commons Deputies are at hand!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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