Now, not counting the Royalists, Feuillantists, Girondists, Hebertists, Dantonists, and others already decapitated or imprisoned according to their merit, how many traitors still remain in the Convention, on the Committees, amongst the representatives on mission, in the administrative bodies not properly weeded out, amongst petty tyrannical underlings and the entire ruling, influential class at Paris and in the provinces?
Outside of "about twenty political Trappists in the Convention," outside of a small devoted group of pure Jacobins in Paris, outside of a faithful few scattered among the popular clubs of the departments, how many Fouches, Vadiers, Talliens, Bourdons, Collots, remain amongst the so-called revolutionaries?
How many dissidents are there, disguised as orthodox, charlatans disguised as patriots, and pashas disguised as sans-culottes ?[31138] Add all this vermin to that which Marat seeks to crush out; it is no longer by hundreds of thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jeanbon-Saint-Andre and Guffroy, that the guilty must be counted and cut off their heads!--And all these heads, Robespierre, according to his maxims, must strike off.
He is well aware of this; hostile as his intellect may be to precise ideas, he, when alone in his closet, face to face with himself, sees clearly, as clearly as Marat.

Marat's chimera, on first spreading out its wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel house; that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, reaches the goal in its turn; in its turn, it demands something to feed on, and the rhetorician, the professor of principles, begins to assess the voracity of the monstrous brute on which he is mounted.

Slower than the other, this one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and teeth, it has a vaster appetite.

At the end of three years Robespierre has overtaken Marat, at that distant end of the line, at the station where Marat had established himself from the very beginning, and the theoretician now adopts the policy, the aim, the means, the work, and almost the vocabulary of a maniac:[31139] armed dictatorship of the urban mob, systematic perturbation of the bribed rabble, war against the bourgeoisie, extermination of the rich, placing opposition writers, administrators and deputies outside the law.
Both monsters get the same food; only, to the ration of his monster, Robespierre adds "vicious men" as its special and favorite prey.
Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to heaven, he cannot avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet the streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he rides.[31140] These ever open and hungry jaws must be daily fed with an ampler supply of human flesh; not only is he bound to let it eat, but to furnish the food, often with his own hands, except that he must afterwards wash them, declaring, and even believing, that no spot of blood has ever soiled them.

He is generally content to caress and flatter the brute, to excuse it, to let it go on.