Each in his own eyes is Roman, savior, hero, and great man.
"I stood in the tribune of the palace," writes Anarcharsis Clootz,[1124] "at the head of the foreigners, acting as ambassador of the human species, while the ministers of the tyrants regarded me with a jealous and disconcerted air." A schoolmaster at Troyes, on the opening of the club in that town, advises the women "to teach their children, as soon as they can utter a word, that they are free and have equal rights with the mightiest potentates of the universe."[1125] Petion's account of the journey in the king's carriage, on the return from Varennes, must be read to see how far self-importance of a pedant and the self-conceit of a lout can be carried.[1126] In their memoirs and even down to their epitaphs, Barbaroux, Buzot, Petion, Roland, and Madame Roland[1127] give themselves certificates of virtue and, if we could take their word for it, they would pass for Plutarch's model characters .-- This infatuation, from the Girondins to the Montagnards, continues to grow.

St.Just, at the age of twenty-four, and merely a private individual, is already consumed with suppressed ambition.

Marat says: "I believe that I have exhausted every combination of the human intellect in relation to morality, philosophy and political science." Robespierre, from the beginning to the end of the Revolution, is always, in his own eyes, Robespierre the unique, the one pure man, the infallible and the impeccable; no man ever burnt to himself the incense of his own praise so constantly and so directly .-- At this level, conceit may drink the theory to the bottom, however revolting the dregs and however fatal its poison even to those defy its nausea for the sake of swallowing it.

And, since it is virtue, no one may refuse it without committing a crime.

Thus construed, the theory divides Frenchmen into two groups: one consisting of aristocrats, fanatics, egoists, the corrupt, bad citizens in short, and the other patriots, philosophers, and the virtuous, that is to say, those belonging to the sect.[1128] Thanks to this reduction, the vast moral and social world with which they deal finds its definition, expression, and representation in a ready-made antithesis.