To obtain her, he had to mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council and find guarantors and sponsors in his small native town.[3155] Once married and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, he finds himself "more burdened with debts than with causes," tied down to a sedentary profession which demands vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale that, without the help of a louis regularly advanced to him each week by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends meet.[3156] His free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude, violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness and activity, all rebel against this life: he is ill-suited for the quiet routine of our civil careers.

It is not the steady discipline of an old society, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces or in a state of formation, that suits him.

In temperament and character he is a barbarian, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century.
A giant with the face of a "Tartar," pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling "bull-dog,"[3157] with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice and moving and acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with passion and energy.

His strength in its outbursts appears boundless like a force of nature, when speaking he is roaring like a bull and be heard through closed windows fifty yards off in the street, employing immoderate imagery, intensely in earnest, trembling with indignation, revenge and patriotic sentiments, able to arouse savage instincts in the most tranquil breast and generous instincts in the most brutal personalities.[3158] He may be profane, using emphatic terms,[3159] cynical, but not monotonous and affected like Hebert, but spontaneous and to the point, full of crude jests worthy of Rabelais, possessing a stock of jovial sensuality and good-humor, cordial and familiar in his ways, frank, friendly in tone.

He is, both outwardly and inwardly, the best fitted for winning the confidence and sympathy of a Gallic, Parisian populace.