CHAPTER I.PSYCHOLOGY OF THE JACOBIN LEADERS.
I.Marat.
Marat .-- Disparity between his faculties and pretensions.
-- The Maniac .-- The Ambitious delirium .-- Rage for persecution.
-- The permanent nightmare .-- Homicidal frenzy.
Three men among the Jacobins, Marat, Danton and Robespierre, had deserved preeminence and held authority:--that is because they, due to a deformity or warping of their minds and their hearts, met the required conditions .-- Of the three, Marat is the most monstrous; he is nearly a madman, of which he displays the chief characteristics--furious exaltation, constant over-excitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and single-mindedness of purpose constrained and ruled by a fixed idea.

In addition to this, he displays the usual physical symptoms, such as insomnia, a pallid complexion, hot-headed, foulness of dress and person,[3101] with, during the last five months of his life, rashes and itching all over his body.[3102] Issuing from ill-matched stock, born of a mixed blood and tainted with serious moral agitation,[3103] he carries within him a peculiar germ: physically, he is a freak, morally a pretender, and one who covet all places of distinction.

His father, who was a physician, intended, from his early childhood, that he should be a scholar; his mother, an idealist, had prepared him to become a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course towards both summits.
"At five years of age," he says, "it would have pleased me to be a school-master, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and a creative genius at twenty,"[3104]and, afterwards, up to the last, an apostle and martyr to humanity.

"From my earliest infancy I had an intense love of fame which changed its object at various stages of my life, but which never left me for a moment." He rambled over Europe or vegetated in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate positions, hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science and ignored as a philosopher, a third rate political writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected,--too great a disproportion between his faculties and ambition! Without talents,[3105] possessing no critical acumen and of mediocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor more or less bold and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path clearly marked out for him.

"But," he says, "I constantly refused any subject which did not hold out a promise....