A portfolio was filled with sketches of equal skill,--but these last were mostly subjects that appalled the eye and revolted the taste: they displayed the human figure in every variety of suffering,--the rack, the wheel, the gibbet; all that cruelty has invented to sharpen the pangs of death seemed yet more dreadful from the passionate gusto and earnest force of the designer.

And some of the countenances of those thus delineated were sufficiently removed from the ideal to show that they were portraits; in a large, bold, irregular hand was written beneath these drawings, "The Future of the Aristocrats." In a corner of the room, and close by an old bureau, was a small bundle, over which, as if to hide it, a cloak was thrown carelessly.

Several shelves were filled with books; these were almost entirely the works of the philosophers of the time,--the philosophers of the material school, especially the Encyclopedistes, whom Robespierre afterwards so singularly attacked when the coward deemed it unsafe to leave his reign without a God.
("Cette secte (les Encyclopedistes) propagea avec beaucoup de zele l'opinion du materialisme, qui prevalut parmi les grands et parmi les beaux esprits; on lui doit en partie cette espece de philosophie pratique qui, reduisant l'Egoisme en systeme regarde la societe humaine comme une guerre de ruse, le succes comme la regle du juste et de l'injuste, la probite comme une affaire de gout, ou de bienseance, le monde comme le patrimoine des fripons adroits."-- "Discours de Robespierre," Mai 7, 1794.

(This sect (the Encyclopaedists) propagate with much zeal the doctrine of materialism, which prevails among the great and the wits; we owe to it partly that kind of practical philosophy which, reducing Egotism to a system, looks upon society as a war of cunning; success the rule of right and wrong, honesty as an affair of taste or decency: and the world as the patrimony of clever scoundrels.)) A volume lay on a table,--it was one of Voltaire, and the page was opened at his argumentative assertion of the existence of the Supreme Being.

("Histoire de Jenni.") The margin was covered with pencilled notes, in the stiff but tremulous hand of old age; all in attempt to refute or to ridicule the logic of the sage of Ferney: Voltaire did not go far enough for the annotator! The clock struck two, when the sound of steps was heard without.