5/117 By pretending this, he kept it up, writing all the while with bitterness and ferocity. He became a cynic in order the more intimately to know the masses. He assumed the language of the lowest reprobates. Like the elder Brutus, he feigned idiocy, but it was not to save his country, it was to urge it to the uttermost bounds of madness, and then control it by its very insanity. All his pamphlets, echoes of the Jacobins and Cordeliers, daily excited the uneasiness, suspicions, and terrors of the people. |