This discourse was visibly concerted, and it was evident that a party, already formed, took possession of the tribune, and was about to arrogate to itself the dominion of the Assembly.  Brissot was its conspirator, Condorcet its philosopher, Vergniaud its orator.  Vergniaud mounted the tribune, with all the prestige of his marvellous eloquence, the fame of which had long preceded him.  The eager looks of the Assembly, the silence that prevailed, announced in him one of the great actors of the revolutionary drama, who only appear on the stage to win themselves popularity, to intoxicate themselves with applause, and—­to die.

XV.

Vergniaud, born at Limoges, and an advocate at the bar of Bordeaux, was now in his thirty-third year, for the revolutionary movement had seized on and borne him along with its currents when very young.  His dignified, calm, and unaffected features announced the conviction of his power.  Facility, that agreeable concomitant of genius, had rendered alike pliable his talents, his character, and even the position he assumed.  A certain nonchalance announced that he easily laid aside these faculties from the conviction of his ability to recover all his forces at the moment when he should require them.  His brow was contemplative, his look composed, his mouth serious and somewhat sad; the deep inspiration of antiquity was mingled in his physiognomy with the smiles and the carelessness of youth.  At the foot of the tribune he was loved with familiarity; as he ascended it each man was surprised to find that he inspired him with admiration and respect; but at the first words that fell from the speaker’s lips they felt the immense distance between the man and the orator.  He was an instrument of enthusiasm, whose value and whose place was in his inspiration.  This inspiration, heightened by the deep musical tones of his voice, and an extraordinary power of language, had drunk in deep draughts at the purest sources of antiquity; his sentences had all the images and harmony of poesy, and if he had not been the orator of a democracy he would have been its philosopher and its poet.  His genius, devoted to the people, yet forbade him to descend to the language of the people, even to flatter them.  All his passions were noble as his words, and he adored the Revolution as a sublime philosophy destined to ennoble the nation without immolating on its altars other victims than prejudices and tyranny.  He had doctrines, and no hatreds; the thirst of glory, and not of ambition,—­nay, power itself, was in his eyes, too real, too vulgar a thing for him to aim at, and he disdained it for himself, and alone sought it for his ideas.  Glory and posthumous fame were his objects alone; he mounted the tribune to behold them, and he beheld them later from the scaffold; and he plunged into the future, young, handsome, immortal in the annals of France, with all his enthusiasm,