[The Companions of Jehu by Alexandre Dumas, pere]@TWC D-Link bookThe Companions of Jehu CHAPTER XXVI 13/15
The other, irritated by the injustices of which his father had been the victim, had at first ardently embraced the revolutionary doctrines.
Instead of the "Annee Litteraire," strangled to death in 1775, he created the "Orateur du Peuple," in 1789.
He was sent to the Midi on a special mission, and Marseilles and Toulon retain to this day the memory of his cruelty. But all was forgotten when, on the 9th Thermidor, he proclaimed himself against Robespierre, and assisted in casting from the altar the Supreme Being, the colossus who, being an apostle, had made himself a god. Freron, repudiated by the Mountain, which abandoned him to the heavy jaws of Moise Bayle; Freron, disdainfully repulsed by the Girondins, who delivered him over to the imprecations of Isnard; Freron, as the terrible and picturesque orator of the Var said, "Freron naked and covered with the leprosy of crime," was accepted, caressed and petted by the Thermidorians.
From them he passed into the camp of the royalists, and without any reason whatever for obtaining that fatal honor, found himself suddenly at the head of a powerful party of youth, energy and vengeance, standing between the passions of the day, which led to all, and the impotence of the law, which permitted all. It was to the midst of this _jeunesse_ Freron, mouthing its words, slurring its r's, giving its "word of honor" about everything, that Morgan now made his way. It must be admitted that this _jeunesse_, in spite of the clothes it wore, in spite of the memories these clothes evoked, was wildly gay. This seems incomprehensible, but it is true.
Explain if you can that Dance of Death at the beginning of the fifteenth century, which, with all the fury of a modern galop, led by Musard, whirled its chain through the very Cemetery of the Innocents, and left amid its tombs fifty thousand of its votaries. Morgan was evidently seeking some one. A young dandy, who was dipping into the silver-gilt comfit-box of a charming victim, with an ensanguined finger, the only part of his delicate hand that had escaped the almond paste, tried to stop him, to relate the particulars of the expedition from which he had brought back this bloody trophy.
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