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 



