A man, at the same time so ardent and so trifling, so trivial and so inspired, so indecisive between blood and tears, so ready to crush what he had just deified with enthusiasm, must have the more empire over a people in revolt, in proportion as he resembled them.
His character was his nature.

He not only aped the people, he was the people himself.

His newspapers cried in the public streets, and their sarcasm, bandied from mouth to mouth, has not been swept away with the other impurities of the day.

He remains, and will remain, a Menippus, the satirist stained with blood.

It was the popular chorus which led the people to their most important movements, and which was frequently stifled by the whistling of the cord of the street lamp, or in the hatchet-stroke of the guillotine.