returned to Arras, and amid the welcome of his
relatives and the good hopes of friends began the practice of an
advocate. For eight years he led an active and seemly life. He was not
wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appetite, about which
the world is mute, but whose better ordering and governance would give a
diviner brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not escape the ordeal
of youth, Robespierre was frugal, laborious, and persevering. His
domestic amiability made him the delight of his sister, and his zealous
self-sacrifice for the education and advancement in life of his younger
brother was afterwards repaid by Augustin Robespierre's devotion through
all the fierce and horrible hours of Thermidor. Though cold in
temperament, extremely reserved in manners, and fond of industrious
seclusion, Robespierre did not disdain the social diversions of the
town. He was a member of a reunion of Rosati, who sang madrigals and
admired one another's bad verses. Those who love the ironical surprises
of fate, may picture the young man who was doomed to play so terrible a
part in terrible affairs, going through the harmless follies of a
ceremonial reception by the Rosati, taking three deep breaths over a
rose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his coat, emptying a glass of
rose-red wine at a draught to the good health of the company, and
finally reciting couplets that Voltaire would have found almost as
detestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of the Supreme Being.
More laudable efforts of ambition were prize essays, in which
Robespierre has the merit of taking the right side in important
questions. He protested against the inhumanity of laws that inflicted
civil infamy upon the innocent family of a convicted criminal. And he
protested against the still more horrid cruelty which reduced
unfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status of
the mediaeval serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not rise
above the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a
manhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on
political reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose political
reform. But the course of events afterwards owed their least desirable
bias to the fact that such compositions were the nearest approach to
political training that so many of the revolutionary leaders underwent.
One is inclined to apply to practical politics Arthur Young's sensible