364 SANSCULLOTISED LITERATURE IN FRANCE. 



And did Lc Pcrc Duchesne disappear along with liis patron 

 Hebert? By no means; in every troublous period in France he 

 resuscitates, and just before the present war he was rendering 

 yeoman service to the modern anarchists, under the name of Le 

 Pcre Peinard — Old Father Drudge. 



It is difficult to separate another contemporary paper, 

 Marat's Ami dii Peuple, from Hebert's Pere Duchesne. But for 

 a few exceptions they followed both the same line of politics, 

 and if it must be acknowledged that they were not written in the 

 same language and the same style, still, to the core they vvere 

 the same. And yet, however odious and loathsome iVIarat may 

 be, he does not deserve the same reprobation as his fellow-pam- 

 phleteer Hebert. What widely divergent psychology ])laces these 

 two neurotics at the opposite poles of the Revolution ! The onft 

 with his Pcre Duchesne, the grotesquely sinister otTspring of Jack 

 Pudding, whose foot has slipped on clotted gore ; the other with 

 his Ami du Peuple, an ideologist of unbounded conceit and 

 vanity, terrible jealousy, and morbid temperament, tottering on 

 the brink of Bedlam, in which he is going to founder. In the 

 series of historical neurotics and lunatics Marat ought to occup>' 

 the place of honour. Does he not himself acknowledge that he 

 is in the grip of the delirium of virtue? But his delirium is the 

 rage of persecution. Everywhere he sees none but scamps and 

 scoundrels rebelling against the native country — that is to say, 

 against him — and with indefatigable obstinacy, he claims their 

 heads. He loves to proclaim himself a martyr of the Revolution; 

 he revels in boasting of the sacrifice he is constantly making of 

 his dear health and his life; and in reality, he is one of those rare 

 champions who shirked the danger and hid themselves in the 

 hour of peril ! He keeps on raving about the ungrateful, frivolous 

 ralible, for whose sakes he is sacrificing himself, and invariably, 

 like the ogre of the fairy-tale, who claims his daily prey, L'A)ui 

 du Peuple demands the holocaust of anti-revolutionists — now 600 

 heads, now 10,000, now 20,000. Michelet, the great French his- 

 torian, who has gone to the trouble of counting these homicidal 

 claims, mentions a total of 270,000 ! Lamartine was kind enough 

 to see in him " Texpression permanente de la colere du peuple." 

 This diagnosis holds no water. Marat's case is barely and simply 

 pathological, and a clinical one for the lunacy ward. Misfortune, 

 or the irony of fate, has willed that the Revolution should take 

 him seriously, instead of relegating him to the padded cell or 

 pinioni'ng him in a straight waistcoat. It is astonishing, 

 iDesides, that the people did not get sick and tired of his uniformly 

 monotonous and desperately prosy prose, when, without a shade 

 of variety, he keeps doggedly harping upon the same string. 

 Michelet expresses this characteristic beautifully when he says 

 that Marat was like the irritating tinkle of a bell, one and the 

 same bell that is being tolled incessantly and without a second's 

 interruption. As for literary quality, in the Ami dti Pettple we 

 find the riff-rafif lingo and style replaced by a language which, 

 if not noble, is at least grammatically correct. This he has in 

 common with the majority of the writers of his time, who, as a 



