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In her own country she was and always had been a good republican: Marat had given her her first start in life by his violent praises of her talent in his widely-circulated paper; she had been associated in Paris with the whole coterie of artists and actors: every one of them republican to a man.
This period was also marked by the independence of the press, the restoration of religious worship, and the return of the property confiscated from the federalists during the reign of the committees. Here was a complete reaction against the revolutionary government; it soon reached Marat and the Mountain.
When on the broad, handsome Place de la Concorde, I saw at the same time, with my bodily eyes, the beautifully impressive obelisk, and in my mind's eye the scaffold on which the royal pair met with their death in the Revolution; when in the Latin quarter I went upstairs to the house in which Charlotte Corday murdered Marat, or when, in the highest storey of the Louvre, I gazed at the little gray coat from Marengo and the three-cornered hat, or from the Arc de Triomphe let my glance roam over the city, the life that pulsated through my veins seemed stimulated tenfold by sight and visions.
We are now in a position to understand why the constitutional monarchy floundered. It had no great leaders to strengthen it and to conduct it through the narrow strait. It was bound to strike the rocks of reaction on one side or those of radicalism on the other. Against such fearless and determined assailants as Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, it was helpless.
When, on the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council of Five Hundred, he pronounced the oath of hatred to royalty, he added, that this oath was in his heart, otherwise no power upon earth could have forced him to take it; and he is now a sworn subject of Napoleon the First! He pronounced the panegyric of Robespierre, and the apotheosis of Marat.
He loved and worshipped Marat, who, sick and fevered, his veins on fire, eaten up by ulcers, was wearing out the last remnants of his strength in the service of the Republic, and in his own poor house, closed to no man, welcomed him with open arms, conversed eagerly with him of public affairs, questioned him sometimes on the machinations of evil-doers.
But, through lack of foresight and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread, and the more it spread the larger the amputation should have been. With the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has made his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at the Commune, he estimates forty thousand as the number of heads that should be laid low.
The club of the Cordeliers, which is sometimes confounded with that of the Jacobins, even surpassed it in turbulence and demagogism. Marat and Danton ruled there.
From its lair about Point Desolation, from the glaciers of the Greenland continent, sweeping round the coast, leaving wrecks in its track, it marched right athwart the other conflicting winds, churning them into a fury, and inaugurating chaos. It was the Marat of the elements. It was the revolution marching into the "dreaded wood of La Sandraie."
And, after all, what the Revolutionary Committee as a body intimidated by Phelippes dared not do could be done by his faithful and less punctilious friends of the Marat Company.
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