Critical Miscellanies | Page 3

May 1758. He was therefore no
more than five and thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in
1794. His father was a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family
had the prefix of nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this
decorative prefix became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre
dropped it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate,
and one of the charges made against him was that he had styled himself
Monsieur D'Anton.
Robespierre's youth was embittered by sharp misfortune. His mother
died when he was only seven years old, and his father had so little
courage under the blow that he threw up his practice, deserted his
children, and died in purposeless wanderings through Germany. The
burden that the weak and selfish throw down, must be taken up by the

brave. Friendly kinsfolk charged themselves with the maintenance of
the four orphans. Maximilian was sent to the school of the town,
whence he proceeded with a sizarship to the college of Louis-le-Grand
in Paris. He was an apt and studious pupil, but austere, and disposed to
that sombre cast of spirits which is common enough where a lad of
some sensibility and much self-esteem finds himself stamped with a
badge of social inferiority. Robespierre's worshippers love to dwell on
his fondness for birds: with the universal passion of mankind for
legends of the saints, they tell how the untimely death of a favourite
pigeon afflicted him with anguish so poignant, that, even sixty long
years after, it made his sister's heart ache to look back upon the pain of
that tragic moment. Always a sentimentalist, Robespierre was from
boyhood a devout enthusiast for the great high priest of the sentimental
tribe. Rousseau was then passing the last squalid days of his life among
the meadows and woods at Ermenonville. Robespierre, who could not
have been more than twenty at the time, for Rousseau died in the
summer of 1778, is said to have gone on a reverential pilgrimage in
search of an oracle from the lonely sage, as Boswell and as Gibbon and
a hundred others had gone before him. Rousseau was wont to use his
real adorers as ill as he used his imaginary enemies. Robespierre may
well have shared the discouragement of the enthusiastic father who
informed Rousseau that he was about to bring up his son on the
principles of Emilius. 'Then so much the worse,' cried the perverse
philosopher, 'both for you and your son.' If he had been endowed with
second sight, he would have thought at least as rude a presage due to
this last and most ill-starred of a whole generation of neophytes.
In 1781 Robespierre returned to Arras, and amid the welcome of his
relatives and the good hopes of friends began the practice of an
advocate. For eight years he led an active and seemly life. He was not
wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appetite, about which
the world is mute, but whose better ordering and governance would
give a diviner brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not escape the
ordeal of youth, Robespierre was frugal, laborious, and persevering.
His domestic amiability made him the delight of his sister, and his
zealous self-sacrifice for the education and advancement in life of his
younger brother was afterwards repaid by Augustin Robespierre's

devotion through all the fierce and horrible hours of Thermidor.
Though cold in temperament, extremely reserved in manners, and fond
of industrious seclusion, Robespierre did not disdain the social
diversions of the town. He was a member of a reunion of Rosati, who
sang madrigals and admired one another's bad verses. Those who love
the ironical surprises of fate, may picture the young man who was
doomed to play so terrible a part in terrible affairs, going through the
harmless follies of a ceremonial reception by the Rosati, taking three
deep breaths over a rose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his coat,
emptying a glass of rose-red wine at a draught to the good health of the
company, and finally reciting couplets that Voltaire would have found
almost as detestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of the
Supreme Being. More laudable efforts of ambition were prize essays, in
which Robespierre has the merit of taking the right side in important
questions. He protested against the inhumanity of laws that inflicted
civil infamy upon the innocent family of a convicted criminal. And he
protested against the still more horrid cruelty which reduced
unfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status of
the mediæval serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not rise
above the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a
manhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on
political