‘Ah, Brissot, are you there, with your bland notions stolen from Plato!’ cried Guadet. ‘It is pleasant even to hear your flute-stop in the wild concert of our hoarse voices!’
‘As to liberty, who can define it!’ exclaimed Brissot.
‘I can,’ cried Lescour. ‘The right to guillotine one’s neighbour!’
‘Who ever understood the meaning of equality?’ continued Brissot, unheeding him. ‘Procrustes was the inventor of it!’
‘And for fraternity: what is it—who has ever practised it?’
‘Cain is the only instance that occurs to me,’ said Guadet gravely.
‘I drink to America,’ said Marat. ‘May the infant republic live by the death of the mother that bore her!’
A wild hurrah followed the toast, which was welcomed with mad enthusiasm.
‘The beacon of liberty we are lighting here,’ continued he, ‘will be soon answered from every hill-top and mountain throughout Europe—from the snow-peaks of Norway to the olive-crowned heights of the Apennines—from the bleak cliffs of Scotland to the rocky summits of the Carpathians.’
In a strain bombastic and turgid, but marked at times by flashes of real eloquence, he launched out into one of those rhapsodies which formed the staple of his popular addresses. The glorious picture of a people free, happy, and prosperous was so mingled with a scene of vengeance and retribution, that the work of the guillotine was made to seem the chief agent of civilisation. The social condition of the nation was described, in the state of a man whose life could only be preserved at the cost of a terrible amputation. The operation once over, the body would recover its functions of health and stability. This was the image daily reproduced, till the public mind grew to regard it as a truism. The noblesse represented the diseased and rotten limb, whose removal was so imperative, and there were but too many circumstances which served to favour the comparison.