The more complete, radical and prompt the destruction is, the more conscious one is of one's strength.

However great the obstacle, one is not disposed to recede or stand still; one breaks away all the barriers which men call good sense, humanity, justice, and the satisfaction of breaking them down is great.

To crush and to subdue becomes voluptuous pleasure, to which pride gives keener relish, affording a grateful incense of the holocaust which the despot consumes on his own altar; at this daily sacrifice, he is both idol and priest, offering up victims to himself that he may be conscious of his divinity .-- Such is Saint-Just, all the more a despot because his title of representative on mission is supported by his rank on the Committee of Public Safety: to find natures strained to the same pitch as his, we must leave the modern world and go back to a Caligula, or to a caliph Hakem in Egypt in the tenth century.[32147] He also, like these two monsters, but with different formulae, regards himself as a God, or God's vicegerent on earth, invested with absolute power through Truth incarnated in him, the representative of a mysterious, limitless and supreme power, known as the People; to worthily represent this power, it is essential to have a soul of steel.[32148] Such is the soul of Saint-Just, and only that.

All other sentiments merely serve to harden it; all the metallic agencies that compose it--sensuality, vanity, every vice, every species of ambition, all the frantic outbursts and melancholy vaporings of his youth--are violently commingled and fused together in the revolutionary mold, so that his soul may take the form and rigidity of trenchant steel.

Suppose this an animated blade, feeling and willing in conformity with its temper and structure; it would delight in being brandished, and would need to strike; such is the need of Saint-Just.