Robespierre

Robespierre Synopsis

Excerpt from Robespierre: A Study

Very often I have sat alone at evening before a fire of logs in a room near the Rue St. Honoré, and tried to call up for myself the great men who from that air challenged necessity, and, within the screen of their armies, created the modern world.

There surrounded me upon such occasions the furniture of their epoch. My eyes rested upon details that were not only in the tradition of the Revolution, but were often used and admired when the Convention was sitting; and all about me, in the severe taste of the French bourgeoisie and in the paucity of ornament that accompanies a certain austere carelessness for fortune, was the atmosphere of those lives to which my thoughts continually turned. The medium in which I attempted to evoke their shadows was their own and was in a fashion my inheritance. About me and in my ears was the clear and sounding life of Paris, nor was my imagination disturbed by any recent memories of privilege, by the sophistries of the modern rich, or by the jargon of the evanescent and false philosophies by whose aid the academies attempt to escape from the traditions of Europe. I was so situated that the justice and endurance of the Republic were as evident as material things, and I knew without any doubt that the stoical temper was, in the fine phrase of a contemporary, the permanent religion of humanity.

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