serious dreamer of the Rousseau school, Saint-Just, hated henceforth the gay and witty fanfaron, Desmoulins. The morally pure, incorruptible Robespierre hated the sensual, money-tainted Danton. Maximilian Robespierre of holy memory was the incarnation of Rousseau; he was deeply religious; he believed in God and immortality; he hated Voltairean mockeries of religion, the undignified tricks of a Gobel,[1] the orgies of the atheists, the loose conduct of the esprits, and perhaps he hated everybody who was witty and laughed.
On the nineteenth Thermidor the Voltairean party, which had been not long previously suppressed, conquered; under the Directory it exercised its reaction on the Mountain; later, during the heroic drama of the Empire, as during the pious Christian comedy of the Restoration, it could only play in minor parts; yet we have seen it, even to this hour, more or less active, standing at the helm of state, and indeed represented by the former Bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice Talleyrand. Rousseau's party, suppressed since that unhappy day of Thermidor, lived poorly, but sound in mind and body, in the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, in the forms of Garnier Pagés, Cavaignac, and of so many other noble Republicans,
- ↑ According to Carlyle, this name should be Göbel—"goose Göbel," probably because he was from Strasburg.
