THE CONTRASTS OF THE REVOLUTION
How extraordinarily difficult to interpret such a movement! Even Carlyle, with all his passionate humanity, fails to catch the figure of that unfortunate woman who tramped through the empty streets of Paris at dawn one gray autumn day, starvation and despair in her eyes, mechanically tapping her drum and lugubriously chanting: “Du pain! Du pain!” (“Bread! Bread!”) That distressing figure, poignant in all its naked emotions, was to uproot the Bourbons from Versailles, to make of Paris once more the capital of France, and by that deed to divert the whole current of French history from a channel of two centuries. And that is the contrast, the difficulty, at every point. Mirabeau is a venal and corrupt individual whose turpitude insistently pursues us, and yet at moments he is the statesman of grand vision whose eye unerringly pierces through the veil of time. Charlotte Corday is but a simple and quite unimportant young woman from the country; she drives a knife into Marat’s heart, and with that heroic gesture flashes light to the very depths of a terrific crisis.