by the friends
of Marat, who, speedily making way for their chief, issued into the open
street.

'Whither now!' cried one aloud.

'To the Bureau--to the Bureau!' said another.

'Be it so,' said Marat. 'The _Ami du Peuple_--so was his journal
called--' must render an account of this night to its readers. I have
addressed seven assemblies since eleven o'clock, and save that one in
the Rue de Grenelle, all successfully. By the way, who is our friend?
What is he called? Fitzgerald--a foreign name--all the better; we can
turn this incident to good account. Are Frenchmen to be taught the
path to liberty by a stranger, eh, Favart? That's the keynote for your
overture!'

'The article is written--it is half-printed already,' said Favart. 'It
begins better--"The impostor is dead: the juggler who gathered your
liberties into a bundle and gave them back to you as fetters, is no
more! "'

'_Ah, que c'est beau_, that phrase!' cried two or three together.

'I will not have it,' said Marat impetuously; 'these are not moments
for grotesque imagery. Open thus: "Who are the men that have constituted
themselves the judges of immortality? Who are these, clad in shame and
cloaked in ignominy, who assume to dispense the glory of a nation? Are
these mean tricksters--these fawners on a corrupted court--these
slaves of the basest tyranny that ever defaced a nation's image, to be
guardians at the gate of civic honours?"

'Ah! there it is. It was Marat himself spoke there,' said one.

'That was the clink of the true metal,' said Chaptal.

And now, in the wildest vein of rhapsody, Marat continued to pour forth
a strange confused flood of savage invective. For the most part the
language was coarse and ill-chosen and the reasoning faulty in the
expression, but here and there would pierce through a phrase or an image
so graphic or so true as actually to startle and amaze. It was these
improvisations, caught up and reproduced by his followers, which
constituted the leading articles of his journal. Too much immersed in
the active career of his demagogue life to spare time for writing, he
gave himself the habit of this high-flown and exaggerated style, which
wore, so to say, a mock air of composition.

Pointing to the immense quantity of this sort of matter which his
journal contained, Marat would boast to the people of his unceasing
labours in their cause, his days of hard toil, his nights of unbroken
exertion. He artfully contrasted a lif