rpasses the haughtiness and arrogance of this tone. It declares itself
at the outset in the harangues of the clubs and in the petitions to the
Constituent Assembly. Loustalot, Freron, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, St.
Just, always employ dictatorial language, that of the sect, and
which finally becomes the jargon of their meanest valets. Courtesy or
toleration, anything that denotes regard or respect for others, find no
place in their utterances nor in their acts; a swaggering, tyrannical
conceit creates for itself a language in its own image, and we see not
only the foremost actors, but their minor associates, enthroned on their
grandiloquent platform. Each in his own eyes is Roman, savior, hero, and
great man.

"I stood in the tribune of the palace," writes Anarcharsis Clootz,[1124]
"at the head of the foreigners, acting as ambassador of the human
species, while the ministers of the tyrants regarded me with a jealous
and disconcerted air."

A schoolmaster at Troyes, on the opening of the club in that town,
advises the women "to teach their children, as soon as they can utter
a word, that they are free and have equal rights with the mightiest
potentates of the universe."[1125] Petion's account of the journey in
the king's carriage, on the return from Varennes, must be read to see
how far self-importance of a pedant and the self-conceit of a lout can
be carried.[1126] In their memoirs and even down to their epitaphs,
Barbaroux, Buzot, Petion, Roland, and Madame Roland[1127] give
themselves certificates of virtue and, if we could take their word for
it, they would pass for Plutarch's model characters.--This infatuation,
from the Girondins to the Montagnards, continues to grow. St. Just,
at the age of twenty-four, and merely a private individual, is already
consumed with suppressed ambition. Marat says:

"I believe that I have exhausted every combination of the human
intellect in relation to morality, philosophy and political science."

Robespierre, from the beginning to the end of the Revolution, is
always, in his own eyes, Robespierre the unique, the one pure man, the
infallible and the impeccable; no man ever burnt to himself the incense
of his own praise so constantly and so directly.--At this level, conceit
may drink the theory to the bottom, however revolting the dregs and
however fatal its poison even to those defy its nausea for the sake of
swallowing it. And, since it is virtue, no one may refuse it without
com