with him from all sources, even the most impure, without remaining with him.  Any other individual would have felt shame before men and parties who had the secret of his dishonour; but he only was not ashamed, and looked them in the face without a blush.  His was the quietude of vice.[3] He was the focus of all those men who seek in events nothing but fortune and impunity.  But others had only the baseness of crime—­Danton’s vices partook of the heroic—­his intellect was all but genius.  He had upon him the bright flash of circumstances, but it was as sinister as his face.  Immorality, which was the infirmity of his mind, was in his eyes the essence of his ambition; he cultivated it in himself as the element of future greatness.  He pitied any body who respected any thing.  Such a man had of necessity a vast ascendency over the bad passions of the multitude.  He kept them in continual agitation, and always boiling on the surface ready to flow into any torrent, even if it were of blood.

XXII.

Brissot de Warville was another of these popular candidates for the representation.  As this individual was the root of the Girondist party, the first apostle and first martyr of the republic, we ought to know him.  Brissot was the son of a pastrycook at Chartres, and had received his education in that city with Petion, his fellow countryman.  An adventurer in literature, he had begun by assuming the name of Warville, which concealed his own.  It is a plebeian nobility not to blush at one’s father’s name.  Brissot had not done so.  He began by furtively appropriating one of the titles of that aristocracy of races against which he was about to raise equality.  Like Rousseau in every thing but his genius, he sought his fortune hither and thither, and descended even lower than he into misery and intrigue, before he acquired celebrity.  Dispositions become weakened and stained by such a struggle with the difficulties of life in the dregs of great corrupted cities.  Rousseau had paraded his indigence and his reveries in the bosom of nature; and as its consideration calms and purifies everything he quitted it a philosopher.  Brissot had dragged his misery and vanity into the heart of Paris and of London, and into those haunts of infamy in which adventurers and pamphleteers drag on a filthy existence:  he left them an intriguer.  Yet in the very midst of these vices which had rendered his honesty dubious, and name bespotted, he nurtured in the depths of his soul three virtues capable of again elevating him—­an unshaken love for a young girl, whom he married in spite of his family, a love of occupation, and a courage against the difficulties of life, which he had afterwards to display in the face of death.  His philosophy was identical with Rousseau’s.  He believed in God.  He had faith in liberty, truth, and virtue.  He had in his soul that unqualified devotion towards the human species which is the charity of philosophers.