But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully — in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.
92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?
We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable. The Theory of Ambitio...
This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the l...
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across d...
The cardinal used to say, Cromewll will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him he will not be there, he wil...
Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it w...
In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverance to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we...
He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: put on a mask, as it were.
He cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ.
Georges told me he would be back, and I have no reason to disbelieve him—but perhaps you’d like to sit down here and write him a letter? Tell him you can’t manage the thing without him, which is true....
Collot is back from Lyon, did you know? He had finished his work, as he describes it. His path of righteousness is very clear and straight and broad. It’s so easy to be a good Jacobin. Collot hasn’t a...
Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace.
As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. The...
Tired
My great-aunts and uncles died in wards like those. Wrapping and muffling themselves, gazing at the long windows streaming rain, visitors would tell the patient: ‘You’re in the best place.
In those days his treason stood still to be proved. This is not Italy, boy. We have courts of law.
Hypocrisy, fraud, idleness—their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and wh...