MARAT INIMICAL TO THE MAYOR. 189 
these instructive comparisons struck only eight or ten 
members of our great assemblies, so small a share has 
suspicion in the national character, so painful is distrust 
to French sincerity. The historians of our troubles 
themselves have but skimmed the question that I have 
just raised—assuredly a very important and very curious 
one. In such matters, the part of a prophet is tolerably 
hazardous; yet I do not hesitate to predict, that a minute 
study of the conduct and of the discourses of Marat, 
would lead the mind more and more to those chapters in 
a treatise on the chase, wherein we see depicted bad 
species of falcons and hawks, at first only pursuing the 
game by a sign from the master, and for his advantage ; 
but by degrees taking pleasure in these bloody struggles, 
and entering on the sport at last with passion and for 
their own profit. 
Marat took good care not to forget that during a revo- 
lution, men, naturally suspicious, act in their more im- 
mediate affairs so as to render those persons suspected 
whose duty it is to watch over them. The Mayor of 
Paris, the General Commandant of the National Guard, 
were the first objects, therefore, at which the pamphleteer 
aimed. As an academician, Bailly had an extra claim 
to his hate. 
Among men of Marat’s disposition, the wounds of self- 
love never heal. Without the hateful passions derived 
from this source, who would believe that an individual, 
whose time was divided between the superintendence of 
a daily journal, the drawing up of innumerable placards 
with which he covered the walls of Paris, together with 
the struggles of the Convention, the disputes not less 
fierce of the clubs; that an individual who, besides, had 
given himself the task of imposing an Agrarian law on 
