There is not one true tone in his elaborate eloquence, nothing but recipes and only those of a worn-out art, Greek and Roman common-places, Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, classic metaphors like "the flambeaux of discord," and "the vessel of State,"[3197]s coupled together and beauties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the college bench;[3198]times a grand bravura air, so essential for parade in public;[3199] centimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in those days, one must have a tender heart;[31100] in short, Marmontel's method in "Belisarius," or that of Thomas in his "Eloges," all borrowed from Rousseau, but of inferior quality, like a sharp, thin voice strained to imitate a rich, powerful voice.

All is a sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because the studied elegance of the closet become pistol shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed sends a man to the guillotine .-- The contrast is too great between his talent and the part he plays.

With such a talent, as mediocre and false as his intellect, there is no employment for which he is less suited than that of governing men; he was cut out for another, which, in a peaceable community, he would have been able to do.

Suppress the Revolution, and Marat would have probably ended his days in an asylum.
Danton might possibly have become a legal filibuster, a highwayman or gangster, and finally throttled or hung.

Robespierre, on the contrary, might have continued as he began,[31101] a busy, hard-working lawyer of good standing, member of the Arras Academy, winner of competitive prizes, author of literary eulogies, moral essays and philanthropic pamphlets; his little lamp, lighted like hundreds of others of equal capacity at the focus of the new philosophy, would have burned moderately without doing harm to any one, and diffused over a provincial circle a dim, commonplace illumination proportionate to the little oil his lamp would hold.
But the Revolution bore him into the Constituent Assembly, where, for a long time on this great stage, his amour propre, the dominant feeling of the pedant, suffered terribly.