But nothing escaped him of what was going on. His ferocious
egoism, his unbounded ambition was even now calculating what
advantages to himself might accrue from this idea of the new religion
and of the National fete, what personal aggrandisement he could
derive therefrom.

The matter outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen and
calculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to
place him--Robespierre--on a yet higher and more unassailable
pinnacle.

Surrounded by those who hated him, those who envied and those
who feared him, he ruled over them all by the strength of his own
cold-blooded savagery, by the resistless power of his merciless
cruelty.

He cared about nobody but himself, about nothing but his own
exaltation: every action of his career, since he gave up his small
practice in a quiet provincial town in order to throw himself into the
wild vortex of revolutionary politics, every word he ever uttered had
but one aim--Himself.

He saw his colleagues and comrades of the old Jacobin Clubs
ruthlessly destroyed around him: friends he had none, and all left him
indifferent; and now he had hundreds of enemies in every assembly
and club in Paris, and these too one by one were being swept up in
that wild whirlpool which they themselves had created.

Impassive, serene, always ready with a calm answer, when passion