is that of all honest people: 'No superiors!'"

Thus, under the great name of Liberty, each vain spirit seeks its
revenge and finds its nourishment. What is sweeter and more natural than
to justify passion by theory, to be factious in the belief that this is
patriotism, and to cloak the interests of ambition with the interests of
humanity?

Let us picture to ourselves these directors of public opinion as they
were three months earlier: Desmoulins, a briefless barrister, living in
furnished lodgings with petty debts, and on a few louis extracted from
his relations. Loustalot, still more unknown, was admitted the previous
year to the Parliament of Bordeaux, and has landed at Paris in search of
a career. Danton, another second-rate lawyer, coming out of a hovel in
Champagne, borrowed the money to pay his expenses, while his stinted
household is kept up only by means of a louis which is given to him
weekly by his father-in-law, who is a coffee-house keeper. Brissot, a
strolling Bohemian, formerly employee of literary pirates, has roamed
over the world for fifteen years, without bringing back with him either
from England or America anything but a coat out at elbows and false
ideas; and, finally, Marat; a writer that has been hissed, an abortive
scholar and philosopher, a misrepresenter of his own experiences, caught
by the natural philosopher Charles in the act of committing a scientific
fraud, and fallen from the top of his inordinate ambition to the
subordinate post of doctor in the stables of the Comte d'Artois.--At the
present time, Danton, President of the Cordeliers, can arrest any one he
pleases in his district, and his violent gestures and thundering voice
secure to him, till something better turns up, the government of his
section of the city. A word of Marat's has just caused Major Belzunce at
Caen to be assassinated. Desmoulins announces, with a smile of triumph,
that "a large section of the capital regards him as one among the
principal instigators of the Revolution, and that many even go so far as
to say that he is the author of it." Is it to be supposed that, borne so
high by such a sudden jerk of fortune, they wish to put on the drag and
again descend? and is it not clear that they will aid with all
their might the revolt which hoists them towards the loftiest
summits?--Moreover, the brain reels at a height like this; suddenly
launched in the air and feeling as if everything was tottering around
them, they u