The gall bladder is full, and the extravasated gall overflows on the dead.

He never tires of re-executing his guillotined adversaries, the Girondists, Chaumette, Hebert and especially Danton,[31149] probably because Danton was the active agent in the Revolution of which he was simply the incapable pedagogue; he vents his posthumous hatred on this still warm corpse in artful insinuations and obvious misrepresentations.

Thus, inwardly corroded by the venom it distills, his physical machine gets out of order, like that of Marat, but with other symptoms.

When speaking in the tribune "his hands crisp with a sort of nervous contraction;" sudden tremors agitate "his shoulders and neck, shaking him convulsively to and fro."[31150] "His bilious complexion becomes livid," his eyelids quiver under his spectacles, and how he looks! "Ah," said a Montagnard, "you would have voted as we did on the 9th of Thermidor, had you seen his green eyeballs!" "Physically as well as morally," he becomes a second Marat, suffering all the more because his delirium is not steady, and because his policy, being a moral one, forces him to exterminate on a grander scale.
But he is a discreet Marat, of a timid temperament, anxious,[31151] keeping his thoughts to himself, made for a school-master or a pleader, but not for taking the lead or for governing, always acting hesitatingly, and ambitious to be rather the pope, than the dictator of the Revolution.[31152] Above all, he wants to remain a political Grandison[31153]; until the very end, he keeps his mask, not only in public but also to himself and in his inmost conscience.

The mask, indeed, has adhered to his skin; he can no longer distinguish one from the other; never did an impostor more carefully conceal intentions and acts under sophisms, and persuade himself that the mask was his face, and that in telling a lie, he told the truth.
Taking his word for it, he had nothing to do with the September events.[31154] "Previous to these events, he had ceased to attend the General Council of the Commune...