SANSCULLOTISKD LITERATURE IN FRANCE. 36,^ 



catecl. \\'hile fawning upon demagogy it enabled the jjeople by 

 its lucid exposes to grasp the most abstruse political propositions, 

 and it is not impossible that the day will coiue when it will be 

 universally recognised that wit, originality, and eloquence — may 

 be the oily c/rmtiiie eloquence of the Revolution — once centred in 

 Hebert and in his abominable Pcre Duchesne. Nevertheless, this 

 Hebert remains the most repulsively odious figure in the galerie 

 of revolutionaries. The memory of even Marat does not ap])ear 

 so deeply stigmatized and so infamous as Hebert's. This is so 

 because, with Hebert, everything is organized hypocrisy, frigid 

 perfidy, and deliberate calculation. Well, we may be able to 

 forgive a good deal of violence, but we cannot possibly condone 

 tartufery. Hebert was an eloquent person, a fop and buck about 

 town, and thoroughly well educated. For him the Revolution was 

 not a means, but an end. H he had been born in the lower strata 

 of the people, whose vile language he handled so deftly, we should 

 not have had to upbraid him for having usurped their argot. But 

 he was a refined aristocrat, and had nothing in common with his 

 proletarian partisans. We may fairly cotui)are him with those 

 politicians who, on canvassing and on ])olling days, after shakings 

 and squeezing the blackened hands of mechanics, rush to the 

 washhandstand to soap off the smut. And yet as late as 1789 

 this Hebert was still a good man, inspired with the very best of 

 feelings. Letters which he wrote to his mother and sisters in 

 these days prove this to the full. W'hat has made him odious 

 to us is his political tergiversation and his time-serving defections. 

 This infuriated caterer for the guillotine was once a militant 

 Royalist, as may be seen from several comj^limentary snatches of 

 poetry dedicated to the Queen, and from his lamentation on 

 an occasion of an indisj^osition of Louis XVI : " Alack- 

 aday, my pleasure is gone ; my wine is like worm- 

 wood, my pipe is rank in my mouth ! My king, my 

 good, kinds king is ill ! Frenchmen ! if you have tears, 

 prepare to shed them now with me." A few months later on this 

 same beloved King became with him the ogre, the fuddled soaker, 

 the churl, the swine, the cuckold Ca]:)et ; and the adorable Queen 

 the she-wolf, the tigress, the frivolous, spoony Austrian monkey! 

 Indeed, it may be said that Hebert dived to the bottom of the 

 well of infamy during his campaign against Marie-Antoinette, 

 whom he persecuted with the ferocity of a hyena. The origin 

 of the Pcre Duchesne is a curious one. This uncouth type had 

 been a character well known among the theatre-going public. 

 Some years before, in a popular farce, a certain potter and 

 furnace-maker had been shown up on the stage who could not say 

 three w^ords without rapping out a shocking oath or other bad 

 language. The groundlings in the pit and the angels in the gallery 

 had been highly anuised at the performance, and the silhou- 

 ette of this old fogey, whose name on the cast was Pcre Duchesne, 

 had remained popular as the incarnation of the sound common 

 sense and the inveterate ignoble coarseness of the mob. Ever 

 since 1789 his name had occasionally adorned political i)amphlets. 



