between the man of the nation, and the man of the bar.

Barnave had the misfortune to be the great man of a mediocre party, and
the hero of an envious faction: he deserved a better destiny, which he
subsequently acquired.


XVII.

Still deeper in the shade, and behind the chief of the National
Assembly, a man almost unknown began to move, agitated by uneasy
thoughts which seemed to forbid him to be silent and unmoved; he spoke
on all occasions, and attacked all speakers indifferently, including
Mirabeau himself. Driven from the tribune, he ascended it next day:
overwhelmed with sarcasm, coughed down, disowned by all parties, lost
amongst the eminent champions who fixed public attention, he was
incessantly beaten, but never dispirited. It might have been said, that
an inward and prophetic genius revealed to him the vanity of all talent,
and the omnipotence of a firm will and unwearied patience, and that an
inward voice said to him, "These men who despise thee are thine: all the
changes of this Revolution which now will not deign to look upon thee,
will eventually terminate in thee, for thou hast placed thyself in the
way like the inevitable excess, in which all impulse ends."

This man was Robespierre.

There are abysses that we dare not sound, and characters we desire not
to fathom, for fear of finding in them too great darkness, too much
horror; but history, which has the unflinching eye of time, must not be
chilled by these terrors, she must understand whilst she undertakes to