United States or Benin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It might involve the best friends of the last Revolution, as it had done the heroes of the first Revolution: he feared that it would not be confined to the La Fayettes and Clermont-Tonnerres, the Duponts and Barnaves, but that it might extend to the Brissots and Vergniauds, to the Condorcets, the Pétions, and to himself.
How then the meaner spirits succeeded in the whirlwind of change, to the mightier minds which first conjured and hoped to control it; how the Mirabeaux, the Lally Tollendals, the Mouniers of the Assembly, were replaced and popularly displaced by the sophists and intriguers of the Gironde and the Constituent; how, in the Convention and the hall of the Jacobins, the coarser men of the whole movement the Dantons, the Robespierres, the Marats, the facetious as ferocious Bareres, the stupid Anacharsis Clootzes trampled under foot, or finished with the guillotine, the phraseurs and meneurs of the Gironde, your orators of set speech, glittering abstractions, and hair-splitting definitions; the Brissots, Vergniauds, Condorcets, and Rolands, who could degrade, dethrone, and condemn a king to perpetual imprisonment, but were just too dainty of conscience to go the whole hog of murder.
To-morrow is a comedy; some youngster will try to rehearse the scene of M. Dimanche, brought up to date. Well, well; these good priests and your Mirabeaus and Vergniauds and the rest of them, are mere stammering beginners compared with these orators of mine.
Word Of The Day