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"I started at once: when I reached Saint-Just I found the freebooters still there; so I walked up to them, trolling a melody, but one of them seized me by the collar and two others took aim at me with their muskets.
"Look at the elective Chamber; you will find no deputies of thirty; the youth of Richelieu and of Mazarin, of Turenne and of Colbert, of Pitt and of Saint-Just, of Napoleon and of Prince Metternich, would find no admission there; Burke, Sheridan, or Fox could not win seats.
The body was exhumed by order of the marshal's widow, and brought to her castle of Saint-Just, in Champagne; she had it embalmed, and placed in a bedroom adjoining her own, where it remained, covered only by a veil, until the memory of the deceased was cleansed from the accusation of suicide by a solemn public trial and judgment.
He had just taken a look at it, and where he had expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a sort of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins, Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not know where he stood. He recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights.
Consider the authentic monuments of its thought the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards. Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and their turgidity.
Their mystic mentality was the same as that of the Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The principal heroes of the Terror Couthon, Saint-Just, Robespierre, &c. were Apostles. Like Polyeuctes, destroying the altars of the false gods to propagate his faith, they dreamed of converting the globe. Their enthusiasm spilled itself over the earth.
"On the day that I am persuaded," writes Saint-Just, "that it is impossible to render the French people kind, energetic, tender and relentless against tyranny and injustice, I will stab myself." "What I have done in the South I will do in the North," says Baudot; "I will convert them into patriots; either they or I must die."
Such is Saint-Just, all the more a despot because his title of representative on mission is supported by his rank on the Committee of Public Safety: to find natures strained to the same pitch as his, we must leave the modern world and go back to a Caligula, or to a caliph Hakem in Egypt in the tenth century.
Tallien then interrupted Saint-Just, and exclaimed violently: "No good citizen can restrain his tears at the wretched state of public affairs. We see nothing but divisions. Yesterday a member of the government separated himself from it to accuse it. To-day another does the same. Men still seek to attack each other, to increase the woes of the country, to precipitate it into the abyss.
And, whatever the order, even when it cannot be executed, so much the worse for him to whom it is given, for the captain who, directed by the representative to establish this or that battery in a certain time, works all night with all his forces, "with as many men as the place will hold." The battery not being ready at the hour named, Saint-Just sends the captain to the guillotine.
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